Describe the InterChange problem.

[~andy/fetchmail] / history.html

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 <table width="100%" cellpadding=0><tr>
 <td width="30%">Back to <a href="/~esr">Eric's Home Page</a>
 <td width="30%" align=center>Up to <a href="/~esr/sitemap.html">Site Map</a>
-<td width="30%" align=right>$Date: 1999/09/26 16:53:39 $
+<td width="30%" align=right>$Date: 1999/12/20 04:35:07 $
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 <HR>
 <H1 ALIGN=CENTER>Trends in the fetchmail project's growth</H1>
 
-The scattergram below was made with Gnuplot 3.7 from data culled directly
-out of the project NEWS file using two custom shellscripts, <a
-href="timeseries">timeseries</a> and <a
-href="growthplot">growthplot</a>.<p>
+The scattergram below was made with Gnuplot 3.7 from data pulled
+directly out of the project NEWS file using two custom shellscripts,
+<a href="timeseries">timeseries</a> and <a
+href="growthplot">growthplot</a>.  If you see a broken-image icon, upgrade
+to a <a href="http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngapbr.html">browser that
+can view PNGs</a>.<p>
 
 <center><img src="growth.png"></center><p>
 
@@ -31,17 +33,17 @@ frequency.<p>
 
 The peak in the earliest part of the graph (before the note "Bad
 addresses dropped") seems to be an artifact; I was not regularly
-dropping addresses that became invalid at the time.  Turnover on the 
-list seems to be about 5% per month (but that's my estimate, I don't
-have numbers on this).<p>
+dropping addresses that became invalid at the time.  Turnover on the
+list seems to be about 5% per month (but that's just my estimate, I
+don't have numbers on this).<p>
 
 The <font color="blue">blue scatter of squares</font> is total
 participants.  The <font color="lime">green scatter of crosses</font> is
 the count of people on fetchmail-friends after I split the list.  The
-<font color="purple">violet scatter of x marks</font> is the population
+<font color="purple">violet scatter of triangles</font> is the population
 of fetchmail-announce after the split.<P>
 
-The <font color="brown">brown scatter of asterisks</font> tracks project
+The <font color="brown">brown scatter of diamonds</font> tracks project
 size in lines of code (right vertical axis). The scale relationship
 between this scatter and the other three is arbitrary.<p>
 
@@ -75,17 +77,32 @@ The growth trend in code size looks sublinear, perhaps logarithmic.
 
 The linear growth trend in population is particularly interesting; a
 priori we might expect geometric or logistic growth, given that the
-project spreads by word of mouth.  I have not yet been able to
-plausibly imagine a growth model that would produce these numbers.<p>
+project spreads by word of mouth.<P>
+
+It has been suggested that the linear growth rate is the result of a 
+situation in which both number of projects and the population of
+eligible programmers are rising on trend curves of the same (probably
+exponential) rate.<p>
+
+There are some other pages doing similar things:<p>
+
+<ul>
+<li>
+<a href="http://kitenet.net/programs/debhelper/stats/">Here</a>
+are growth statistics on the debhelper packaging utility.<p>
+
+<li>
+<a href="http://durak.org:81/sean/pubs/kfc/">Here</a> is a page on the
+vocabulary of the Linux kernel.<p>
+</ul>
 
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 <P><ADDRESS>Eric S. Raymond <A HREF="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com">&lt;esr@thyrsus.com&gt;</A></ADDRESS>
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