At least according to ohloh [1], when measuring commits to open-source projects, the graph is below:
[2]
Food for thought for Marco Cantù, the new Delphi Product Manager [3]? The percentage figures are back in the 2004 range, and the trend after going downhill for years, reversed to shows 3+ years of growth.
When looking in details though, a most of the recent years activity is on projects around FreePasca [4]l and Lazarus [5] projects, whereas at the turn of the millennium, the vast majority of it was targeted at Delphi.
The above chart is expressed in terms of percentage of activity in all open-source projects, 0.4% is low, but that better than Visual Basic does [6] 😉 though there arguably never was a strong Visual Basic open-source community to begin with.
Other fashionable languages (C#, Java, PHP,Ruby, etc.) are quite higher, though their trends are flat or downward. Even Objective-C [7], is quite flat, indicating Apple developers probably don’t share.
There is however one language, that shows a constant, tranquil upward trends, it’s… JavaScript [8]
[9]
I couldn’t find other languages with a similar trend, except maybe Python [10].