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7 <TITLE>Trends in the fetchmail project's growth</TITLE>
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16 <H1 ALIGN=CENTER>Trends in the fetchmail project's growth</H1>
18 The scattergram below was made with Gnuplot 3.7 from data pulled
19 directly out of the project NEWS file using two custom shellscripts,
20 <a href="timeseries">timeseries</a> and <a
21 href="growthplot">growthplot</a>. If you see a broken-image icon, upgrade
22 to a <a href="http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngapbr.html">browser that
25 <center><img src="growth.png"></center><p>
27 The graph shows the population growth of the fetchmail project. The
28 horizontal scale is days since baseline, which is when I started
29 collecting statistics in October 1996 at version 1.9.0. Left vertical
30 scale is number of participants. There is one data point for each
31 release; therefore, the changes in density of marks indicate release
34 The peak in the earliest part of the graph (before the note "Bad
35 addresses dropped") seems to be an artifact; I was not regularly
36 dropping addresses that became invalid at the time. Turnover on the
37 list seems to be about 5% per month (but that's just my estimate, I
38 don't have numbers on this).<p>
40 The <font color="blue">blue scatter of squares</font> is total
41 participants. The <font color="lime">green scatter of crosses</font> is
42 the count of people on fetchmail-friends after I split the list. The
43 <font color="purple">violet scatter of triangles</font> is the population
44 of fetchmail-announce after the split.<P>
46 The <font color="brown">brown scatter of diamonds</font> tracks project
47 size in lines of code (right vertical axis). The scale relationship
48 between this scatter and the other three is arbitrary.<p>
50 This graph is quite revealing. Several trends stand out: <p>
54 Over time, the project population displays rather consistent linear growth.<p>
57 The key event in the project's lifetime was release 4.3.0 in October
58 1997, when I declared the code to be out of development and in
59 maintainance mode, and split the fetchmail list.<p>
62 The run-up to 4.3.0 saw the most intensive spate of releases in the
63 project's history (the gap in that run happened when I took a two-week
64 vacation). It was followed by a significant slowdown.<p>
67 After 4.3.0, the developer population remained fairly stable around
68 an average of about 250 participants.<p>
71 Essentially all population growth after 4.3.0 happened on the announce list,
72 among people using fetchmail but not active co-developers.<p>
75 The growth trend in code size looks sublinear, perhaps logarithmic.
78 The linear growth trend in population is particularly interesting; a
79 priori we might expect geometric or logistic growth, given that the
80 project spreads by word of mouth.<P>
82 It has been suggested that the linear growth rate is the result of a
83 situation in which both number of projects and the population of
84 eligible programmers are rising on trend curves of the same (probably
87 There are some other pages doing similar things:<p>
91 <a href="http://kitenet.net/programs/debhelper/stats/">Here</a>
92 are growth statistics on the debhelper packaging utility.<p>
95 <a href="http://durak.org:81/sean/pubs/kfc/">Here</a> is a page on the
96 vocabulary of the Linux kernel.<p>
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106 <P><ADDRESS>Eric S. Raymond <A HREF="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@thyrsus.com></A></ADDRESS>