[Zope] Ah, I found it -- Estimate of community size

[ethan mindlace fremen]

Jimmie Houchin wrote:

> I would have to say that both are accurate at the time they were given.
> However, neither will be a truly accurate measurement of the users of
> Zope and the Zope community.
> 
> They each measure different things. One measures the people who have
> "joined" Zope.org.
> """The extremely large Members folder (11139 of you!)"""
> The other measures subscribers to the mailing list.
> """There are 1617 members of zope@zope.org"""
> 
> There are a few people who have different identities on the Zope
> memberships. There will also be possible duplication on the mailing list
> due to different email addresses. There are also people who neither join
> Zope.org nor subscribe to the mailing list, but who have nevertheless
> downloaded and use Zope.
> 
> There also are people who have been on the mailing lists, learned and
> then subsequently left the lists, but still use Zope. There are also
> those who no longer do.
> 
> So, who knows what an accurate figure would be? 


This is impossible! Zope is distributed with Red Hat and Debian, both of 
which are availiable via anonymous ftp.  It looks like there are about 
10 subscribers to zope@zope.org that are likely gateways (like 
zope-list@something.org) who could be doing whatever they want.

If it helps any, only about 20% of the population of the 13 colonies 
actively supported the Revolution and less than 10% were active in the 
fighting, IIRC. So if you want, you could say that only 10% of the users 
of Zope are active members of mailing list, which gives you about 20,000 
installs of zope.

The members of zope.org is totally erronious.  There's some obvious 
one-time users there.  I will indeed be working on finally eliminating 
the "down for maintinance" comment, and part of that is to ditch 
spurious users.

But anyway, there's no concrete way to count zope users: estimation is 
the best we'll ever get.

ethan mindlace fremen
Zopatista Community Liason