In a survey of Open Source developers GitHub emerged as the most popular hosting site and Git as the preferred source control system.

More than 1,000 participants responded to Microsoft's most recent survey of open source developers conducted to discover current preferences for on hosting sites and source control systems.

By being a repeat of a survey conducted last November it is possible to identify some changes in preferences.

If you click on the above table you can see that the shows that among developers using Linux as their OS Github has increased in popularity for hosting by over 10% with BitBucket losing a similar percentage. This means that GitHub is now preferred by two thirds of Linux  and 85% of Mac developers. Source control preferences show it is again Linux developers who have changed their preferences with over 10% now favoring Git at the expense of Mercurial.

The charts below show that there are distinct differences  in preferences  between those who develop on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

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With regard to hosting sites, CodePlex  is all but ignored by those working with Linux and Mac OS but it  is equally popular as GitHub among Windows developers - in fact with its 38% share it is now 0.1% ahead of GitHub.

(click chart to enlarge)

For source control Git is the most popular in all three operating systems. But while 78% of Mac developers and 65% Linux developers choose Git, fewer than a third of Windows developers opt for it.

Among Windows developers between 24% and 20% choose Subversion, Mercurial and TFS.  Mercurial is in second place for Linux developers (15%) with Subversion third (12%) and their order is reversed 8% and 9% for Mac OS.

It looks as if the differences between a Windows and a Mac/Linux developer go deeper than just the languages and the operating system.

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