Re: Octave download statistics

[John W. Eaton]

On 13-Dec-2006, Shai Ayal wrote:

| Well, I guess this is going to be one of the mysteries we will learn to 
| live with ....
| Maybe a clue is the 7904 downloads of octave-forge 2006-07-10 listed on 
| sourceforge. This number suffers all the limitation you cite, but still, 
|   I think this means octave has at least several 10,000's of users

Here are some more data points for you, from a presentation I made
in Nov 2005:

  \textbf{Some available data:}

  Octave web and ftp sites:
  \begin{itemize}
  \item More than 15,000 downloads of the sources for version 2.1.71
    from \url{ftp.octave.org} (5 months).
  \item About 35,000 page views per month for the \url{www.octave.org}
    front page.
  \end{itemize}
  \pause

  Octave Forge (a collection of contributed code):
  \begin{itemize}
  \item More than 70,000 downloads of the binary package of Octave
    2.1.50 for Windows (27 months).
  % http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2888
  \item About 40,000 page views per month (total for site).
  % 
http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=2888&ugn=octave&type=&mode=alltime
  \end{itemize}
  \end{frame}

  % ----------------------------------------------------------------------

  \begin{frame}\frametitle{Mailing Lists}
  Postings to the primary Octave mailing lists for 2005:

  \begin{center}
    address@hidden@{\qquad}c}
                                    & subscribers & messages \\
    address@hidden        & 450         & 4000 \\
    address@hidden         & 100         & 1100 \\
    address@hidden & 120         & \phantom{0}900
    \end{tabular}
  \end{center}

  \begin{itemize}
  \item Participation is increasing.
  \item Traffic has more than doubled in the last two years.
  \end{itemize}
  \end{frame}

I haven't tried to check, but I'm pretty sure that the mailing list
traffic is still increasing (now that the mailing lists are not on a
system I manage, it is not as easy as it used to be to get this kind
of information).  The current subscriber totals are:

  help:        585
  bug:         125
  maintainers: 153

Note that the maintainers list is open, and most who subscribe are
lurkers, not active maintainers, so don't let that number fool you
into thinking that there are more than enough people working on
Octave.  You could get a better estimate of the number of people
actually working on Octave by taking a look at the ChangeLog entries
over the last year or so.

jwe