ReadWriteHack

Google's lashing out at competitors over patent claims has set off another round of discussion about the role and value of software patents (be sure to read Microsoft's response). It's an issue that lawyers and technologists have been discussing for a long time.

The nuances of such a debate are beyond the capabilities of a simple poll such as this one, but just to gauge the community's response to the issue, we're asking you: is it time to end software patents?

Earlier this month the Java 7 release candidate came out, and the official version was released earlier this week. Now that it's out, and apart from some serious bugs, what do you think about it?

We asked you recently whether you want to use a platform-as-a-service, and it turns out most of you either want to or already do. But outside of ReadWriteWeb, PaaSes have yet to catch fire.

Bob Warfield suggests that the two keys to a successful PaaS are 1) Revenue generation (such as through an app market) and 2) Commodity pricing. It reminds me a lot of our post What do Developers Dream Of? Fun, Money and Beautiful Machines.

What is that you look for in PaaS?

Yesterday on Twitter RedMonk analyst Michael Coté asked whether developers actually want to use platform-as-a-services (such as Heroku or Engine Yard) instead of just setting up their own environment on an infrastructure-as-a-service.

I could speculate as to whether the fact that PaaS vendors do in fact have developers paying to use their services is evidence that developers want to use these services, or whether developers habit of setting up their own development environments extends to the cloud. Or I could just ask: do you want to use a PaaS?

As we reported earlier this week, several Google APIs are being deprecated or shut-down, including the Translate API, Code Search API, and Google Wave API.

Do you use any of these APIs? Have you found alternatives yet?

Earlier today we asked whether the HTML5 related performance enhancements in Internet Explorer 9 and 10 would be enough to woo developers from other browsers and operating systems to Microsoft's platform. And we recently asked whether OSX is still a developer friendly platform. But we've never asked you what environment you actually do your development in.

We know this community doesn't necessary represent the broader population of developers, but of course we'd still like to know: what operating system do you use to get most of your coding done?

"Apple had about 2.06 percent of the US desktop market in 2003. By 2010, OS X had about 10.9% of the market," writes Github developer Zach Holman. "There's a slew of reasons for this growth, but I think a large part of it is the migration of software developers from Windows to OS X starting in the early 2000's. Attracted by the reasonable UNIX toolchain and the straightforward usability approach, more and more geeks adopted OS X as their primary machines."

But there's always been a blight in developing on OSX under languages other than Cocoa, and that's compiler support. In order to get gcc, developers have had to download Xcode. According to to Holman, this wasn't a big deal back when X-Code was less than 500MB. But now Xcode costs $5 from the Apple App Store, and it's a 4.5GB download that takes up 15GB once installed.

Last week's Hacker Poll revealed that home is the most popular place among you for coding. That made us curious: where do you work?

Since we assume most of you also have side projects, and that many of you have a non-coding job as your primary source of work, we'd like to know specifically what your primary coding gig is.

So if you work full time as a Web developer for your local government, but hack on several projects on the side, mark "I work for a non-profit or government organization." But if you're a lawyer with a secret coding habit, mark "I just code for fun."

We've asked you before what your favorite IDE is. And we've covered a few developer-centric text editors for the iPad. But what if you want to develop apps from your browser? There are a few options available, including Ace, Cloud9 IDE (which uses Ace), CodeMirror, Eclipse's Orion and the Chrome app SourceKit (which also uses Ace).

Do you use any of these? Which one is most promising?

Today Jobs Rated released the results of its annual rankings of various jobs. Software engineer came in first. The organization ranks jobs based on physical demands, work environment, income, outlook and stress. You can find out more about the methodology here. Last year, actuaries beat out software engineers.

Other positions that scored high are mathematician (#2), statistician (# 4) and computer systems analyst (#5).

What do you think?