[GRASSLIST:4119] Some GRASS user statistics

[Markus Neteler]

Hi,

in a sort of interview I was asked about the number of GRASS users 
worldwide.

Here some numbers:

A rumour says: estimated 10,000-30,000 users worldwide.
It's hard to estimate, but we have the download rates:

- 1 master site (ITC-irst, Italy)
- around 25 mirror sites worldwide with daily syncronization
  (cascaded mirrors to minimized bandwidth usage at the master site)

- Web stats of the IRST master site at, see http://grass.itc.it/webalizer/

   - HTTP-protocol based downloads: 40-80GB/month
     (not considering IRST-FTP and rsync; note that before June 2004 the
      grass.itc.it was heavily bandwidth-limited by 'modthrottle')

   - Example July 2004: 
     * binaries:
       - GRASS 5.7.0 for MS-Windows: 573 downloads
       - GRASS 5.0.2 for MS-Windows: 287 (generic) + 185 (X11) downloads
       - GRASS 5.0.3 for Linux:      290 downloads
       - GRASS 5.3.0 for MS-Windows: 150 downloads
       SUM: 1485
 
     * source code:
       - GRASS 5.7.0 source code:    558 downloads
       - GRASS 5.3.0 source code:    190 downloads
       - GRASS 5.0.3 source code:    170 downloads
       SUM: 918

Keep in mind that
       - Mandrake
       - Fedora (Redhat)
       - Debian
       - Gentoo
       - FreeBSD 
       etc
offer precompiled RPM packages for easy installation.

There is also direct CVS access which is not considered here.
 
The downloads statistics of the 25 mirror sites I don't have.

<fantasy>
Assuming an identical download rate for all sites (there are
additionally the FTP mirror sites, not considered here),
we may get:
 
 Binaries: 1485 * 25 [+ distributions] = 37125 downloads in July 2004
 Sources:   918 * 25                   = 22950 downloads in July 2004
worldwide.
</fantasy>

In institutions a single installation is often used by several
users over network. So even that increases the user statistics.

Markus

-- 
Markus Neteler     <neteler itc it>       http://mpa.itc.it
ITC-irst -  Centro per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica
MPBA - Predictive Models for Biol. & Environ. Data Analysis
Via Sommarive, 18        -       38050 Povo (Trento), Italy