Developers are choosing commercial, rather than non-commercial, distributions of Linux when it comes to building high-performance or mission-critical systems, according to new research.

Evans Data Corporation questioned 400 open source developers last month and found that non-commercial Linux distributions are still favoured for web development and embedded systems.

But the research also showed that commercial flavours are strongly preferred for higher-end systems, mission-critical large enterprise development and data centre development.

"The open source nature of Linux, and the availability of Linux source code, appeal to developers doing complex leading-edge and mission-critical work," said John Andrews, president of Evans Data Corp.

"But they also like the additional support they get with commercial products. And since improper configuration is the largest perceived security threat to a Linux system, configuration and management tools that come with commercial distros are important in these situations."

The survey found that Ubuntu is the most popular distribution (24 per cent of respondents), followed by Red Hat Linux (21 per cent) and Red Hat Enterprise (19 per cent).

VMware emerged as the most popular virtual machine technology. Over a third of developers are using it, something that the company is looking to capitalise on with its new product announcements.

Apache/BSD-style or GPL2 are by far the most popular open source licensing models, according to the survey. GPL3 and LGPL were well down developers' lists.