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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 culled directly
19 out of the project NEWS file using two custom shellscripts, <a
20 href="timeseries">timeseries</a> and <a
21 href="growthplot">growthplot</a>.<p>
23 <center><img src="growth.png"></center><p>
25 The graph shows the population growth of the fetchmail project. The
26 horizontal scale is days since baseline, which is when I started
27 collecting statistics in October 1996 at version 1.9.0. Left vertical
28 scale is number of participants. There is one data point for each
29 release; therefore, the changes in density of marks indicate release
32 The peak in the earliest part of the graph (before the note "Bad
33 addresses dropped") seems to be an artifact; I was not regularly
34 dropping addresses that became invalid at the time. Turnover on the
35 list seems to be about 5% per month (but that's my estimate, I don't
36 have numbers on this).<p>
38 The <font color="blue">blue scatter of squares</font> is total
39 participants. The <font color="lime">green scatter of crosses</font> is
40 the count of people on fetchmail-friends after I split the list. The
41 <font color="purple">violet scatter of x marks</font> is the population
42 of fetchmail-announce after the split.<P>
44 The <font color="brown">brown scatter of asterisks</font> tracks project
45 size in lines of code (right vertical axis). The scale relationship
46 between this scatter and the other three is arbitrary.<p>
48 This graph is quite revealing. Several trends stand out: <p>
52 Over time, the project population displays rather consistent linear growth.<p>
55 The key event in the project's lifetime was release 4.3.0 in October
56 1997, when I declared the code to be out of development and in
57 maintainance mode, and split the fetchmail list.<p>
60 The run-up to 4.3.0 saw the most intensive spate of releases in the
61 project's history (the gap in that run happened when I took a two-week
62 vacation). It was followed by a significant slowdown.<p>
65 After 4.3.0, the developer population remained fairly stable around
66 an average of about 250 participants.<p>
69 Essentially all population growth after 4.3.0 happened on the announce list,
70 among people using fetchmail but not active co-developers.<p>
73 The growth trend in code size looks sublinear, perhaps logarithmic.
76 The linear growth trend in population is particularly interesting; a
77 priori we might expect geometric or logistic growth, given that the
78 project spreads by word of mouth. I have not yet been able to
79 plausibly imagine a growth model that would produce these numbers.<p>
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88 <P><ADDRESS>Eric S. Raymond <A HREF="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@thyrsus.com></A></ADDRESS>