“Ideas come from data.” – Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics

We built RedMonk Analytics a year ago to provide the best source of developer trends in the world. We began by starting with what we controlled, mining our own data byproducts for insight. Having published thousands of articles on developer related topics over the past nine years, we built a system that watched what developers did with same. This data we then filtered for noise, mined it for patterns, then served it up to our users.

Our typical user is someone intent on better understanding what what developers were interested in and asking about, in answering questions like “How popular is Node.js, really?” While we’ve incorporated in a variety of third party data sources, however, from Infochimps’ Trstrank data to Del.icio.us and Twitter metrics, RedMonk Analytics has been primarily about the data that we generate. Or more accurately, the data our developer audience generates by interacting with us.

That RedMonk-heavy data bias ends today. With our latest and biggest RedMonk Analytics feature drop to date, we are now able incorporate data from any source, provided it can be formatted as a spreadsheet.

Some of the data currently pouring into the system comes from our own research; it’s information that we have curated or collected from outside sources. Examples include programming language framework traction taken from the data mining we’ve done on Hacker News, or our programming language tiers that are based in turn on GitHub and StackOverflow statistical correlation analysis we did. Or maybe it’s just presenting research and development costs for technology vendors.

But we are also hard at work inserting data obtained directly from commercial and non-profit third parties like Black Duck and the Eclipse Foundation.

RedMonk Analytics is about providing you with the best possible picture of developer wants and needs; and if you want to do check the source for more detailed investigation, everything’s attributed, branded and linked. Which is why more and more commercial organizations are talking to us about the data they have that they’re not using, how to begin leveraging it and what they’d like to share with us.

For our users, present and future, we hope you enjoy our ever expanding library of developer related datasets. This should help you make better decisions, whether you’re in marketing, strategy or are a developer trying to make the case for a preferred technology. We’ve got data in here on everything from Flash vs HTML5 to cloud platform traction to programming language commit histories.

If it’s about developers, we either have it, or we’ll do our best to get it.

What’s in it for Users?

We believe that we’re building the most complete, quantitative source of developer related trends and behaviors anywhere. So to the extent that you care about what developers are doing, this product should interest you.

RedMonk Analytics will be continually adding new data sources from our research and from third parties, ensuring that the developer picture gets ever better and more comprehensive over time. Some data will give you historical perspective; other sources will be up to the minute.

All will help you make better decisions in your technical strategy, your developer engagement, your community and partnership strategy and your business. Interested in subscribing? Ping us analytics @ redmonk.com.

What’s in it for Data Partners?

Black Duck is a perfect example of how we work with commercial data partners. Black Duck is in the business of providing management and governance services around open source software. They are not, generally, in the business of mining their data for insights about developers generally. They are, however, possessors of a wealth of related data. And while Black Duck’s not in the business of developer research, we are.

Which is one area in which we’ve been working with the company, helping to glean insights from their their data, the output of which has been projects such as our joint webinar.

From Black Duck’s perspective, then, we’re taking interesting little snapshots of their data, which help round out our developer picture, showcasing all of the interesting data that they have at the same time. Throw in the fact that RedMonk Analytics is effectively another channel for them, and it’s the basis for a good relationship.

Have interesting data, and want to know more? Great, we’ve got the slides for you.

What this means for RedMonk

When James and I founded RedMonk in 2002 – that’s right, we’ll be ten next year – we made the conscious decision to “not do” numbers. Not because we didn’t want to, but because we didn’t think that anybody had good numbers about the audience we cared about – developers – and their tools. It was relatively easy to determine how many x86 servers Dell shipped per quarter; it was – and still is – impossible to tell how many times MySQL was downloaded in a given day.

But over the past few years, we’ve been able to increasingly tap into a variety of data sources that serve as a proxy for measurement. We might not be able to tell you how many times MySQL’s been downloaded in a given year, but we can tell you how frequently it’s being discussed relative to alternatives in a given community. And so on.

This is, as far as we’re concerned, the future: blending high broad and diverse quantitative data analysis with our traditional qualitative advice. This is why I went back to school to learn statistics, why we optimized for this training in our hiring process, and why we built this system for us and for you.

This is the new RedMonk, where we heart data. If you do too, we should talk.

“If you give me someone who’s nice and who’s passionate, I can teach them everything else. I don’t care what school you went to, I don’t care where you worked before. If you give me someone with those two traits, they will nine out of 10 times be a great success in the company.” – Andy Lansing

Even for companies that do it well, hiring is an inefficient process. And as a company that hires but rarely, RedMonk possesses no special expertise in the area. Our biggest advantage is that we’re able to think about the process creatively. We aren’t restricted to hiring an established analyst, for example; Cote was a developer of IT management products when he came to us.

We hire those who we think will become good analysts, period. Which requires passion. And for our own sake, we look for people we get along with. Everything else is negotiable.

That said, hiring someone who’s nice and passionate and has a Ph.d. in addition to deep expertise in your field doesn’t hurt. Enter Donnie Berkholz, the newest Monk.

Monktoberfest attendees will know him as our closing speaker – a session that got rave reviews. We are hiring Donnie away from the Mayo Clinic, where he’s currently a Research Fellow. While he’s spent the bulk of his professional career as a scientist, he’s got long term exposure to technology, having been deeply involved in the Gentoo Linux project as a developer and council member since 2003. He’s also been a contributor to X.org since 2005, and has administered Google Summer of Code efforts for both.

Donnie’s more than an open source expert, however. As anyone who’s followed his constructive criticism of our analyses is aware, he’s got deeper statistical training than I have and has legitimate programming skills. And if you follow him on Twitter I think you’ll find his insight on everythng from cloud to mobile to big data more than up to the RedMonk standard.

He can also write, and not just for academic journals. His minor in journalism has been put to good use as a regular contributor to LWN.net, the highly regarded open source news source.

With us, he’ll be covering the same broad spectrum of topics that we cover, and with his background as a researcher, we expect his transition to the world of analysis to be smooth. It’s certain to be less complicated than “Applying structure-based drug design to the moonlighting enzyme dihydrolipoamide dehydrogenase to target detrimental oxidative stress,” anyway, the focus of one of his 2010 papers (PDF link).

As a former user of Gentoo, Donnie and I have a long history together, having met for the first time at OSCON in 2005. I’ve always had a strong appreciation for his work, and I’m thrilled that he’ll be working on our behalf as of December 1st.

To our clients, we’re happy to schedule introductory calls for you as soon as he’s officially on board. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming Donnie, and if you’re curious, see our interview with him from the conference.

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto from planet to dwarf planet. Al Jazeera launched Al Jazeera English. The Winter Olympics were held in Turin. At RedMonk, we brought on our first analyst.

Which was a big step for a two person analyst shop born in the ashes of the dot com bubble oriented around a consituency – developers – no one cared about then. The new addition was a developer out of BMC with an irreverent technology blog, one that indicated to us that the author had analyst potential. We hired Michael Cote largely on this basis; certainly neither of us ever met him in person prior to bringing him on board. We took a chance, believing that he had the makings of a good analyst. We were fortunate to be wrong about that. He became an excellent analyst.

Those of you who’ve worked with Cote over the last half decade plus understand this; we have yet to find a client that doesn’t love his unique brand of insight, self-deprecating humor and homespun wisdom. He’s been, in short, a perfect hire. Not bad for our first time out of the gate. Which is why we’re sad to be losing him.

You heard that correctly: one week from today is Cote’s last day as a ‘Monk.

It’s an unfortunate day for us, then, because Cote has not only been an outstanding analyst and a model employee, but a friend and part of the RedMonk family. Being small has its privileges, one of those being that you can treat your employees like actual people. Like family. The only downside to that is that it makes departures that much more painful, that much more personal.

While we are disappointed to be losing him, however, we can’t argue with his logic, taking a good job with Dell close to home in Austin. Analyst life has many perks, but for a new father, the travel isn’t necessarily one of them.

As we wish him well in his future endeavours, the obvious question is what this changes at RedMonk.

The simple answer is quite a bit, as responsibilities will be obviously be changing as a result of Cote’s departure. The correct answer, however, is nothing. Our mission remains: someone needs to fight the good fight on behalf of the developers the world over. And more often than not, that someone is us. Or maybe you know another analyst firm whose raison d’etre is pushing developer agendas on topics like FOSS, dynamic languages, REST, non-relational datastores, DevOps, or Web 2.0…literally years before they were popular. For example.

The technology industry is in the early stages of accepting what RedMonk has known for years: developers are the most important constituency in the business. We see this in the nature of the inquiries we’re receiving; when chip manufacturers and storage infrastructure providers tell us they need a developer story, it’s safe to say that the industry as a whole is coming to appreciate the importance of geeks. We also see this in inquiry volume; at no point in our history have we ever been busier.

Which is why we’re already in conversations to bring on another analyst.

To be clear, we are not replacing Cote, we are hiring another analyst. Cote had – has – a diverse set of skills that we are unlikely to replicate perfectly. But the person we eventually bring on will have their own strengths as well, and the fact that our business is increasingly incorporating quantitative analysis informs our needs from a hiring perspective.

Why work here? The most obvious reason is that RedMonk remains, in my obviously biased opinion, an amazing place to work. There aren’t many jobs available that allow you to influence the strategic direction and decision making process of some of the biggest and most important technology companies in the world, that give you a pulpit to produce public research for some of the best and brightest developers on the planet. Fewer jobs still let you work on things that are important, things that improve the day to day lives of developers, and by extension, the users they service. Tim O’Reilly says to “work on stuff that matters“; we think we do, almost every day.

Add in the flexibility that working for a small firm offers, from the ability to define your own research agenda to good hardware to variable vacation time to the option of working from home, and it’s a damn good gig.

More importantly, RedMonk is in the process of becoming something more than just an analyst firm. We will always provide high quality analysis services for our clients, but our vision for where this business is headed from a data perspective is, in my view, unparalleled, and the opportunity is large. Which is not to say that RedMonk is all work and no play: I defy you to find a more interesting, different and fun conference than our upcoming Monktoberfest.

Who will we hire? The best fit we can find. We’re talking to some interesting candidates already, but we’re open to all interested parties. Fair warning: we will be very picky. You need to be able to communicate effectively, write well and be committed to rational discourse. You should have a reasonable online presence and a passion for developers and the tools they use. Other things we’ll look for include programming skills, economics and statistics training and experience with rich media. Previous experience as an analyst is a bonus, but absolutely not required. Interested? Send a CV and anything else you believe we should consider to hiring @ redmonk.com.

Whomever we hire, they’ll have big shoes to fill. Losing an employee of Cote’s caliber cannot be spun as a positive. Our loss is unquestionably Dell’s gain. But with challenge comes opportunity, and there is little shortage of that at RedMonk these days. While we mourn the departure of our first hire and our friend, then, we are eager to see where a new hire might take us.

On a personal note, let me just say this: thank you, Cote. For all of your hard work, all of the sacrifices, your professionalism and your willingness to do whatever neded to be done. You’ve got an exceptionally bright future in this industry, and we are happy to have placed some small part in advancing that. Anything you ever need from us, we’re here.

Last, to our clients and customers: if any of you have questions about this news, feel free to contact myself (sogrady @ redmonk.com) or James (jgovernor @ redmonk.com). We’re happy to answer anything we can.

Thanks are in order, before we begin. The response to RedMonk Analytics has easily exceeded my expectations. Thousands of you read our launch post, and dozens of you have reached out to express interest, schedule demos, or just say “exciting, or “very promising,” or, my favorite, “great idea.” The folks at ReadWriteWeb, meanwhile, were kind enough to interview us on the project and its place in the landscape.

As we said Monday, we’re excited to launch the product, but we’re even more excited about where we’re going – not least because of some of the organizations that have contacted us since Monday’s news. But we’ll have more on all of that in time. For today, I wanted to take a few minutes to explain how we built RedMonk Analytics and why we built it the way we did. And for those of you who were upset that I didn’t launch the product with a Q&A – and you know who you are – this one’s for you.

Q: For those that haven’t seen RedMonk Analytics yet, how about a few questions: can you describe the product quickly?
A: Sure. RedMonk Analytics is a subscription based SaaS tool that mines our content and various third party data sources for patterns, trends and other insights about developer behaviors.

Q: How does it work, conceptually?
A: The basic premise is straightforward: we write content aimed at developers, where developers also includes sysadmins, DBAs, architects, desginers, and so on. Developers read and search for this content, generating some metrics, occasionally commenting or linking to it externally, generating other metrics. We capture these metrics, clean them up a bit, analyze them, and serve up the result to customers. In the very near future, we will be layering in additional developer related data sources from a variety of third parties (and as a reminder, please do contact us if you’re interested).

Q: Who is the intended user? Do I need to be an analytics specialist?
A: Not at all. The system was built for non-technical users, and is oriented not around data, but questions. Rather than presenting you with charts, we start you with a dashboard that tries to help answer simple questions about what developers want and who they are, using our data. No statistics or compsci degrees required.

Q: What subjects does the system address?
A: Because it’s based off our data, the system addresses anything we cover. From application development to big data to cloud to mobile to IT management to open source and so on, it’s all in there. Want your reports to be based off of custom keywords, like Linux, for example? Drop us a line.

Q: What is the system built on, from a front end perspective?
A: Update: My original understanding was that the web front end for RedMonk Analytics was built on top of WordPress. Turns out we actually bypassed it, given our minimal needs. The application front end is actually based on CodeIgniter and Crowd Favorite’s Oxygen framework. WordPress is still core to the application, however.

Q: Why WordPress?
A: WordPress has been the foundation of our business for years, with both our blogs – the source of much of our data – and our homepage, WordPress based. We’ve been able to extend WordPress in some interesting ways, and the result powers our product.

Q: How did you extend WordPress?
A: We’re using a custom WordPress plugin written for us by Crowd Favorite to feed the system. This was important because it allowed us to link the sites to the application easily, but also because it will permit us to grow the system in future to other WordPress properties.

Q: What’s the infrastructure that powers RedMonk Analytics?
A: Our software stack – the custom WordPress implementation aside – is fairly generic. We’re using a stock Ubuntu image, MySQL, and of course Apache and PHP.

Q: Why LAMP generally, and why Ubuntu specifically?
A: We’re using LAMP for the same reasons most people use LAMP: the cost and friction of acquisition is zero, the support – both commercial and non – is excellent, it’s something we know fairly intimately after all of these years, but most importantly: it just works. Most of the time, anyway. As for Ubuntu specifically, I was given the option during the construction process to pick my distribution, and I selected Ubuntu in part because of its volume acceptance in cloud settings but more because it’s the distribution I run personally. There were lots of other viable choices, but if or when I need to work on the system, I’m most familiar with Ubuntu. What’s interesting to consider is whether or not I would have had the same choice, say, three years ago: most web shops at that point were building off of Fedora, CentOS, or RHEL. That I was offered Ubuntu here is something of a change.

Q: Where are you hosting the application?
Q: RedMonk Analytics is currently run off of a single large EC2 instance at Amazon.

Q: Why Amazon?
A: Well, everyone else was doing it…I kid, I kid.

Anyway, several reasons. First, a cloud or at least managed hosting provider was a given for me, because RedMonk is at the stage in our lifecycle where I need for the operational responsibilities for the infrastructure to be someone else’s problem. Much as I love tinkering with machines, I absolutely do not have time to play sysadmin. Because we’ve never built anything like this before, as well, we need to have the ability to flexibly and elastically add – or subtract – both compute power and storage. Meaning that cloud infrastructure was clearly in order here.

With that understanding, we looked at our options and Amazon’s combinating of pricing, tooling and yes, popularity, made them a winner. There are a variety of cloud infrastructure providers, of course, but not too many of them have an Ubuntu integration like this. It’s all about barriers to entry, remember.

Q: Are you building your own data warehouse?
A: Yes and no. We are storing data locally for performance reasons, among others, and we do therefore have a portion of the local infrastructure devoted to storage. A lot of the heavy lifting at present, however, is outsourced to Google Analytics. We’re calling out to it for substantial portions of the data displayed in the tool. Our future plans, however, will require more local data, so we’ll be fleshing out the storage and warehouse like elements of the system moving forward.

Q: How are you handling backup?
A: We’re using BackupMoxie to snapshot the instance in the event of failure.

Q: Any last thoughts?
A: Just that we’re grateful for the response we’ve gotten thus far, and hugely appreciative of the time and consideration the project’s been given. We look forward to continuously improving the system in the months ahead, and we’ll try and keep you posted here on our approach with respect to infrastructure. Both as a means of documenting our decision process for the benefit of others, but also in the event that some of you spot mistakes that we’re making.

“It’s to learn where your initial hypothesis is wrong that you launch.” – Paul Graham

The venture capital community has an idea called an “investment thesis.” This, as Fred Wilson describes it, is the lens through which investors see the world and a potential investment’s place in it. RedMonk is in the analyst business rather than the venture game, but if we had an investment thesis it would be simple: developers. Using the term loosely, of course. In a devops world, we use developers interchangeably to refer to sysadmins, designers, architects and even the odd enlightened DBA. Geeks, makers, call them what you will: they are our people. As James put it, “At RedMonk we celebrate the practitioner and their methods.” In a world in which “there’s an app for that” has been trademarked, the idea that these folks are important doesn’t seem that radical, but trust me: things were not always thus.

In the old days, developers were an afterthought for most technology companies. Vendors and their marketing arms targeted the buyer, better known as the CIO. Big analyst houses sprang up to arbitrage the knowledge asymmetry from vendor to customer, and everyone was happy.

Except the developers, of course.

As it turned out, they didn’t always like the tools the analysts recommended and the buyer bought for them. Which isn’t surprising, because no one had thought to ask them what they wanted, instead trusting third parties who may or may not have actually used the tools for recommendations. A strange thing happened along the way, however: developers found themselves free tools that they liked betted than the commercial ones. Tools that they didn’t have to ask anyone for. Tools that they could actually modify if they needed to. And my how things changed.

Fast forward to the present day, where the developer is firmly in the driver’s seat. The largest vendors in the world – consumer and enterprise alike – are falling over each other these days to court the “new” kingmakers. Apple, like Microsoft before them, is standing on the shoulders of giants: the teeming millions that build the applications that make their platform so compelling. From Amazon to Google to IBM, developers are the new It crowd.

None of this surprised us at RedMonk. It is, after all, what we’ve been saying since, oh, 2002 or so. What we’ve been saying, however, has always been qualitative in nature. Until today. Let me introduce you to RedMonk’s first product, RedMonk Analytics, referred to internally as Project Arcturus. RedMonk Analytics is, as far as we’re aware, the world’s first developer intelligence tool. The product is intended to turn industry analysis on its head. Rather than analysts telling CIOs what to buy, we’re going to tell customers what the developers want so that they can provide it.

The Idea

Project Arcturus was born at least three years ago, as I crawled through the data gathered by our various web analytics tools. Data that we were, for all intents and purposes, wasting. You can learn some interesting things from your website, if you listen to it. Particularly interesting things if, like RedMonk, you have a highly specialized audience.

The last time RedMonk’s share of visitors using Internet Explorer placed higher than third was five years ago. Almost eighty percent of our traffic these days is from Firefox and Chrome, and hell – almost 20% of the visitors to my blog run Linux. The only audience visiting our blogs, in other words, are developers. Which makes sense, because our content is written for developers. What could we learn from this audience if we but paid attention? This is what Arcturus is all about. Newspapers are using their web analytics data to inform their coverage; we’re doing the same, but also making it available to you.

Arcturus mines our web traffic – as well as some third party data sources like Delicious and Twitter, but more on that in a bit – for insight, which we capture and will sell to our clients. Who can then turn around and use this quantitative insight to cater better to what developers actually want. Neat, huh?

We think so too.

The Present

As the small crowd of people I’ve done private demos for to date can tell you, I liken the state of Arcturus today to Amazon’s EC2 circa 2006. Not in importance, obviously: absurd wouldn’t begin to cover that claim. Rather in terms of its maturity. EC2, remember, was pretty bare bones when it launched: a far cry from the product it is today. Arcturus, similarly, is in its infancy. What we’re doing here is exactly what Graham talked about above: we’re launching to see where our initial hypothesis is wrong. Because of course it will be, somehow. Think of this as a beta.

Right now, Arcturus can give you some interesting tidbits, served up by topic. Customized on a per client basis, your dashboard will be prepopulated with, say, open source and big data metrics if you’re in that space. Or maybe cloud and IT management. Or you can customize your own.

The first three reports that we’re generating are simple, as you can see above. They try to explain, simply and out of the box, what developers are asking. what developers are reading, and who the developers are. We don’t want users to have to learn a system: we want them to be able to log in and see – quickly – what developers are thinking about, and what the trends are.

Either way, the system will give you the basics like where the developers are coming from, for example.



Lots of sites do that, of course. But we can also tell you, by ranking, what developers are interested in. To get this we comb all of the incoming traffic to our various properties and simply watch the keywords that geeks use to end up on our site.



Did you know that Node.js takes 3 out of the top 5 spots in October searches? Or that “rds mysql licensing costs” is the 37th most common query to RedMonk, one spot ahead of “migrating from iphone to android?” You will.

Even better, we can tell you where these developers are coming from – those that come in off a corporate network, anyway (we’re stripping out generic IPs from ISPs and the like). Which university’s students are reading up on Node.js? Which government agency staffers are worried about the future of Java? Which Fortune 50 organization is digging into Big Data and NoSQL?



Use Arcturus and you’ll know. How are different subjects trending on Twitter and Delicious?



We can tell you. And this is just the start. With what we have now, plus a few interesting additions we’ll be rolling out in the weeks ahead, it should be increasingly compelling for those of you who need to understand developers. And who doesn’t, these days?

The Privacy

“Wait, you’re tracking me? You know who I am?” No, we are not tracking you: we’re tracking the aggregate of you. Basically we’re looking at the same data that any web analytics package will collect for you. We’re not using Facebook connect, there’s no registration system, etc. Arcturus has no notion of you as an individual – you’re just an IP to us – so rest easy.

The Future

Besides emulating Amazon – who, incidentally, provides the infrastructure foundation for Arcturus – in the “launch early” department, we’d like to mirror them in one other aspect: iteration. We plan to have a steady drumbeat of new reports, data sources and features for customers to look forward to. We’re already planning for the next version, which will offer more sophisticated ways to parse the data we have, but more importantly will be integrating data we’ll be collecting via partners. You’ll have to stay tuned for more on that, but in the meantime we can tell you that we’re putting our heads together with our friends at Infochimps, for starters.



Do you have a datasource that’s developer related? Great, drop us a line (analytics [at] redmonk.com): we’d love to talk to you. Alternately, if you don’t have data but know what you would like to see, be sure to ping us. We might be able to find it, and bump your needs up on the queue.

The Availability

First, the bad news: Arcturus isn’t free like all of our content is. Sorry. We did have to pay to build it, remember, and we have to pay to run it. So no free rides, at least for now. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the product is going to be available under the same, simple subscription terms our RedMonk services have always been. Those of you with popular developer-centric blogs should drop us a line, as well: we might just have a program for you. We’re going to be absurdly picky about who gets in, just to warn you, but ping us and at least we can chat.

Big picture, Arcturus is in a private beta. Fully functional, but rapidly evolving. Current RedMonk customers are eligible for discounted pricing, and pricing is further discounted during the beta period. Now’s the time to sign up, in other words. If you’d like to schedule a demo, talk pricing or simply are interested in future product updates, feel free to add your name to the list here.

The Users

Who might use Arcuturus? Well, anyone interested in developers, obviously. But more specifically, here are a few of the obvious candidates:

• Marketers:
  What are developers interested in these days, and how does that fit with your offering(s)?
• Competitive Intelligence:
  What are developers saying about your products, and your competitors’ products?
• Enterprise Strategy:
  Where are developers going, and what does this mean for your product roadmap?
• Evangelist / Advocate:
  How can you convince your boss about a developer trend you’re seeing? Data might help.
• Sales:
  Developers are increasingly leading the buyers. How do you stay ahead of the curve, and anticipate what they’re looking for?

And so on. As we continue to build out the dataset, you can expect to see more and more data about the developer demographic made available to you at regular intervals.

The Credit

Before I forget, let me give credit where credit is due. I’ll get deeper into how Arcturus is built in the next post, but for now let me thank the gang from Crowd Favorite. Still our favorite development shop, they’ve done a remarkable job shepherding us through the process of building an application that no one’s ever built before. From walking us through the implications of different architectural choices to helping turn my abominable mockups into a working application, I trust these guys. We’re pretty thrilled with the work they’ve done thus far, and it’ll only get more interesting from here on out. Can’t recommend them highly enough.

The Name

Some of you, no doubt, are curious about the name: what the hell is Arcturus? Well, what better name for our Evil Plans than the one Homer Simpson worked on for Hank Scorpio, the Bond villain? Because as he says, Project Arcturus couldn’t have been successful without you, the developers.

Please join me in welcoming RedMonk Analytics into the world, and be sure to sign up if you’re interested in hearing more. Next up, look for Part 2: how Arcturus was built.

Ask ten people that know RedMonk what we’re about, and you’ll probably get ten different answers. Maybe more. Some think of us as “you know, the open source guys.” To others, we’re the guys who “are a bit different.” There are even some who think, because of the etymology of our name, we only cover IBM and Microsoft.

None of which, of course, are correct.

But the one thing most everyone who deals with us gets is that we are about developers. We were founded on the simple idea that technology adoption was in the process of changing. What was once a strictly top down selection process had become fundamentally bottom up. Developers, more than any other single audience, were and are the determining factor in a given technology’s success or failure.

Certainly we listen to CIOs, IT managers and the like. But developers are why we exist.

This is why we give the presentations we do. This is why we help the developers that we know get free gear. This is why we will argue on behalf of open source foundations, even against our own clients, if necessary. This is why we do podcasts and interviews with developers. This is why we run @monkjobs. This is why we make our content available for free, and sponsor the production of open source software.

This might also be why some people think of us a bit differently than some of the other analyst firms out there.

It is definitely why, however, it was very weird to be told by a friend that our home page didn’t use the word developers once. Zero mentions. Everybody’s got issues with their home page, sure, but this was absurd.

Consider how the opening paragraph on our webpage used to read:

RedMonk is the first analyst firm built on open source. We’re dedicated to providing high quality research at no cost, and believe that the dialog that follows is beneficial to us, our community and our clients.

All true, in our view. But while that does an excellent job of telling you how we do things, it does an exceptionally poor job of telling you what we do. Which is suboptimal, given that that’s kind of the reason for having a home page.

So we updated it yesterday to the following:

RedMonk is the first and only developer focused industry analyst firm. We believe that developers are the most important constituency in technology, which is why we work on their behalf for technology companies large and small.

Still true, or so we believe, just a bit more on topic. To be sure, nothing has actually changed but the text. We are still the same business, the same analysts that you’ve always worked with. We are hopefully just getting a bit better at talking about that.

And lest you think this is just talk and marketing crap, rest assured that we’ll be talking to you soon, hopefully, about a few things we’ll be rolling out that might be of interest to developers and those care about developers.

In the meantime, please don’t be shy if you’re a developer and we can help. That’s why we’re here, after all.

I’m a bit late with the 2009 retrospective, I know, but I had better things to do on my winter vacation. Like trying to stop the apartment from bleeding heat. Yes, my winter vacation was all home improvement and no tropical getaway. But at least I didn’t have to get on a plane.

Anyway, I touched on one of the important observed metrics for me from 2009, the trendline towards bloated posts. But I thought you might be interested in some other data on the happenings around here.

Top Twenty Posts Read in 2009, By Pageviews

Two quick notes: first, I’ve filtered out a few of the HowTo type articles because they do disproportionate traffic as references of a sort. Second, I’ve included in parentheses the PostRank score for each piece. While they get a little wonky from time to time, they’re a more nuanced look at performance as they include engagement metrics – comments, Twitter links, etc – which complement the more simple pageview numbers used here in ranking.

Pageview rankings are courtesy of Google Analytics.

1. What’s in Store for 2010? A Few Predictions (10)
2. Google Wave: Tsunami or Microwave? The Q&A (10)
3. Linux vs OpenSolaris…Again: The Q&A (1.0)
4. Open Source and the Cloud: Where’s the LAMP? (10)
5. The Oracle Predicts a Setting Sun (8.7)
6. Oracle, MySQL and the EU: The Q&A (9.6)
7. The View from HadoopWorld (9.9)
8. Five Developer Blogs You Should Read (NA – this post is five years old, just FYI)
9. VMware Taps a new SpringSource: The Q&A (7.3)
10. Firefox: Hearing Chromium’s Footsteps? (6.8)
11. Question for Cloud Campers: The Cloud and Standards (10)
12. AGPL: Open Source Licensing in a Networked Age (9.1)
13. What Would the Operating System Look Like if It Were Designed Today? The Chrome OS Q&A (3.7)
14. Ask Not What the Zend Server Can Do To Java, But What It Can Do For PHP (9.0)
15. The Open Database Alliance and the Future of MySQL (2.4)
16. Clouds Rolling In: The Google App Engine Q&A
17. Does the GPL Matter? In a Word, Yes (8.9)
18. DTrace vs SystemTap, Redux (8.3)
19. Cloud Types: Fabric vs Instance (9.8)
20. Amazon, RDS and the Future of MySQL (6.9)

Top Four Browsers

Firefox is still the reigning champ around these parts, as expected, with IE predictably lagging significantly. Of moderate surprise is Chrome placing behind Safari: enough of the power users I know have switched that I expected that number to be a bit higher. But with its general market share hovering around 1%, I suppose eight and a quarter qualifies as an outperform.

1. Firefox: 52.48%
2. Internet Explorer: 21.85%
3. Safari: 9.85%
4. Chrome: 8.25%

Top Ten Operating Systems

Still a massive Windows majority, but Linux besting Mac tells you something about the audience around here. Otherwise, I’m a bit surprised at iPhone and Android numbers, respectively, but then again, people probably have better things to read when they’re out and about than this blog.

1. Windows – 58.70%
2. Linux – 19.45%
3. Macintosh – 18.32%
4. iPhone – 1.70%
5. SunOS – 0.75%
6. (not set) – 0.43%
7. Android – 0.20%
8. iPod – 0.20%
9. SymbianOS – 0.07%
10. BlackBerry – 0.06%

Top Ten Countries of Origin

174 countries visited the site in 2009. That’s not too bad at all. Here are the top ten, by visits.

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. Germany
5. India
6. Australia
7. France
8. Netherlands
9. Sweden
10. China

Top Three Keyword Searches

These were interesting, I thought. More on the keyword searches later.

1. opensolaris vs linux
2. developer blogs
3. 2010 predictions

Well, here we are, you and I, grossly in the future according to SpamAssassin. Welcome, and let’s skip the joke about the flying cars, shall we?

As RedMonk spins back up, coming off of our customary two week holiday slowdown, a quick word on post length. As those of you who follow me on Twitter may be aware, one of my downtime holiday projects was running Alex‘s WordPress scripts against the database that runs this site. The results, while not surprising, were not encouraging.

The post total has fallen off in the last two years, but a.) at 151 on the year that’s just shy of 3 posts a week and b.) it’s as much a function of my experimentation with del.icio.us alternatives and the shift of content to channels like Twitter as anything else. So no real concerns there.

The bigger problem is one that many of you are already painfully aware of: bloat. Here’s the length of my posts, by character count, chronologically from 2005 to 2009: 3341, 3705, 4435, 5183, 6349. While brevity’s never been a personal strength, that trendline is not sustainable, for me if not for all of you.

Recognizing that there will remain occasions where the extended, long form commentary is not only appropriate but essential – occasions such as the acquisition of Sun, for example – the average post length simply has to come down. Which I’ll be working on; witness this piece.

I am curious, however, as to what all of you think? What would you like to see around here? Multiple smaller pieces tackling the same subject? Serial coverage, if you will? Or do you still prefer slightly longer pieces that consolidate coverage? Let me know in the comments or over on Twitter. I can’t promise to take requests, as it were, but I’ll sure as hell be reading them. Even if I don’t have the space to write about them all.

Part of our job at RedMonk is to answer questions about free and open source software. For the most part, it’s an enjoyable job, because it’s an interesting subject and the questions themselves are an opportunity to learn.

What’s unfortunate, though, is the frequency with which some of the same questions recur. Like the undead, the cursed things just won’t die. Even if you don’t mind answering the same question over and over, it’s fairly clear that there remain widespread misunderstandings about free and open source software, which is not likely to prove beneficial to adoption, usage and participation.

So what to do?

We’ve been thinking about just that question at RedMonk for a while, not least because more than a few of our customers and friends have similarly struggled with the issue. A number of remedies have been proposed and discarded over the past few months, but despite the vetting of a number of possibilities, none of the various options from forum to wiki separated itself from the pack.

Separately, we spend a fair amount of time looking at the question of social software. Not least because a wise man once observed that “these days, almost all software is social software.” Not surprisingly, then, we’ve been paying close attention to sites like Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood‘s Stack Overflow.

Like a lot of you, I’m sure – one of the folks I’ve previewed our little effort with claimed to be Stack Overflow’s biggest fan – I enjoy that site as much for the way its authors seamlessly baked in social components as I do the content. This led, inevitably, to the idea that it offered one potential model for addressing the open source questions that we felt were going unanswered and undocumented.

The effort to build something comparable, however, was daunting, particularly since we already have a few projects running. With all due respect to this guy, we didn’t see Stack Overflow as something that could be thrown together “in a weekend.”

Fortunately enough, we didn’t have to. The creators of Stack Overflow have logically and kindly decided to make their platform available, commercially, to other interested communities. And a lot of interested communities there are. But none, regrettably, that targeted the kinds of free and open source questions we – and many of you – answer repeatedly.

So we spun up an instance, which can be found at www.fossfaq.com. We’ll be using it to ask and answer questions relating to free and open source software, and we think you might find it useful for the same reason. There’s an FAQ on FOSS FAQ available here, but it being me, you know there’s a Q&A coming.

Q: What’s FOSS FAQ all about?
A: The basic idea is to take the questions that we all answer – whether by email, in person, on blogs, and so on – and document them openly, in one place. Think Doc Searls “answering emails in public,” if all of your email was about questions relating to free and open source software.

Q: What kinds of questions do you expect people to ask?
A: I expect to be surprised, actually. Mostly because I already have been.

But in the meantime, we already have some interesting questions and answers available. Bill de hÓra asked a really interesting question about what linking means in the context of an IP connection. PostgreSQL’s Josh Berkus, meanwhile, asked and answered an excellent question about how to choose a license for your open source project. Palm’s Dion Almaer asked why you’d choose the Apache license over the GPL, or the MIT. Eclipse’s Ian Skerrett asked how you might convince a boss that his company should participate in an open source community, and GNOME’s Stormy Peters had an answer for him. Our own Tom Raftery wanted to know about good open source video editing solutions, while Cote is curious about the best licensing choices for cloud provider’s SDKs.

That one still hasn’t been answered, incidentally. Nor has Chris Tirpak’s regarding usage of Apache 1.3 vs 2.x.

Q: So in essence, you’re hoping for a Stack Overflow, but for FOSS?
A: Yep. It’s just that simple.

Q: What’s the “social software” angle? I’m not familiar with Stack Overflow.
A: There are a number of different elements, from voting – which ranks and prioritizes answers – to badges, which are marks of achievement that you earn by participating on FOSS FAQ.

Q: So it’s like Foursquare, but for answering FOSS questions rather than hitting bars?
A: Pretty much, yes.

Q: Why are some people answering their own questions?
A: If they’re like me, because they a.) get asked the particular question a lot and b.) know the answer. But I’m sure there will be plenty of unanswered questions to come, as we’re seeing already.

Q: How can people help?
A: Give the site a look. Ask the questions that you have, answer the ones that you know. Recommend it to a friend. Twitter or blog about it. This site, like other community efforts, is basically a function of critical mass. We’ve got a great start, and if you have suggestions on site improvements, potential partnerships and so on, just let me know.

Q: Why does the site design suck?
A: Because I did it. That’ll improve in time: patience.

Q: How does FOSS FAQ relate to existing free and open source forums and discussion areas like, say, the Ubuntu Forums?
A: Well, the intention is for FOSS FAQ to address the more horizontal questions, leaving the distribution and project specific queries to those types of venues. But ultimately, the site will serve whatever purpose the users ask of it, given that they’re the ones in charge.

Q: Why do I have to use www.fossfaq.com rather than fossfaq.com?
A: Because I have to request the latter from support. It’ll get here.

Q: Who’s paying for FOSS FAQ?
A: Currently, no one, because the StackExchange guys aren’t charging while it’s in beta. Once it becomes a paid service, RedMonk will be absorbing that cost.

Q: Is the software that powers StackExchange open source?
A: No.

Q: Isn’t that kind of hypocritical, to run an open source site on a closed source platform?
A: Maybe, but as I noted in the FOSS FAQ FAQ, there really aren’t any credible open source alternatives available. eWeek’s Jason Brooks was kind of enough to remind me about Shapado, but I didn’t feel comfortable launching with a .1 release. The good news, however, is that FOSS FAQ will – post-beta – provide you with a dump of the database, so presumably at some point in the future when Shapado or another alternative like SOClone is sufficiently mature, we can make the jump.

Q: Anything else to add?
A: I’d like to sincerely thank all of the site’s “beta testers” and previewers. I really appreciate their feedback, advice, criticism, ideas and support.

We’re really hoping that proves to be a useful resource for all of you. Let’s not keep answering the same questions. If we can offload those to FOSS FAQ, we should all benefit. Any other questions, post them here and I’ll answer them.

This was supposed to be a post about what I’d consider to be an obvious enterprise marketplace candidate, but between Firefox 3.5, Weave, and some tinkering with