Re: GNOME: numbers of users, patches/revisions

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
> I'm working on the press release and I'm finding it hard to figure out:
>
> About how many users can I claim GNOME has?  (To simplify: the desktop,
> not the platform.)

I was previously asked this question & did a back of the envelope
calculation based on guesstimates.

The bottom line was working from Ubuntu's market share & their announced
user numbers, extrapolating across distributions that include GNOME by
default, I got to somewhere in the region of 12 to 15 million users,
back in 2008.

Basically, Canonical announced 8 million users a few years back, and
with Ubuntu market share (guessed from various Linux user surveys, which
is not a random population), that translated into over 12 million GNOME
users.

Somehow I agree with John, calling out our user base is in some sense
setting up market share as the way we keep score, when clearly it isn't.

> "GNOME 3 will reach [number] of users around the world."  What's a
> reasonable number to predict?

Ah, now we're getting into whether GNOME apps & platform + Unity = GNOME
3. Touchy subject...

> How many patches/code changes have been committed since the 2.0 release
> 9 years ago?  (Tried viewing the repos, can't figure out how to get a
> total like this.)

You can make a list of the modules you're counting, do a git log -M for
each of them, concatenate the results, and then run gitdm on the result.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org