11 December 2005

Counting users

Bryce talks about the classic subject of Importance of Cross Platform OSS Applications, i will not argue for or against, just make one small nitpick:

our measurements showed more Windows-based Inkscape users than Linux ones


We all know the measurement method of counting SourceForge downloads is flawed: Inkscape is included in all major Linux distros and any sane user will prefer to use the native packages provided by his distro instead of Autopackage or static RPMs.

So yes, i agree probably there are more Inkscape users on Windows than on Linux, but the ratio is not the one illustrated by sf.net downloads. We, as any other OSS project, just don't have a reliable way to count the users - see the 100 M downloads of Firefox or 50 M downloads of OpenOffice.org.

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