X-Git-Url: http://pileus.org/git/?a=blobdiff_plain;f=history.html;h=0567305accafbaa28c4f2227808413c8883d38e2;hb=6214b235a85f291c8b175ec4a6e84b68b906560b;hp=7cf4179d46ab196c9a23283d73405aa22abdf9f7;hpb=a1915783730862e5cd8b1ac6c990dc5a309123d5;p=~andy%2Ffetchmail diff --git a/history.html b/history.html index 7cf4179d..0567305a 100644 --- a/history.html +++ b/history.html @@ -10,15 +10,17 @@
Back to Eric's Home Page Up to Site Map -$Date: 1999/09/26 16:53:39 $ +$Date: 1999/12/20 04:35:07 $

Trends in the fetchmail project's growth

-The scattergram below was made with Gnuplot 3.7 from data culled directly -out of the project NEWS file using two custom shellscripts, timeseries and growthplot.

+The scattergram below was made with Gnuplot 3.7 from data pulled +directly out of the project NEWS file using two custom shellscripts, +timeseries and growthplot. If you see a broken-image icon, upgrade +to a browser that +can view PNGs.

@@ -31,17 +33,17 @@ frequency.

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).

+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).

The blue scatter of squares is total participants. The green scatter of crosses is the count of people on fetchmail-friends after I split the list. The -violet scatter of x marks is the population +violet scatter of triangles is the population of fetchmail-announce after the split.

-The brown scatter of asterisks tracks project +The brown scatter of diamonds tracks project size in lines of code (right vertical axis). The scale relationship between this scatter and the other three is arbitrary.

@@ -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.

+project spreads by word of mouth.

+ +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.

+ +There are some other pages doing similar things:

+ +

Back to Eric's Home Page Up to Site Map -$Date: 1999/09/26 16:53:39 $ +$Date: 1999/12/20 04:35:07 $

Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>
-