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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 <p>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.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html">browser that
23 can view PNGs</a>.</p>
25 <center><img src="growth.png" alt="Fetchmail trends graph"></center>
27 <p>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 <p>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 <p>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 <p>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 <p>This graph is quite revealing. Several trends stand out: </p>
54 <p>Over time, the project population displays rather consistent linear growth.</p>
57 <p>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 <p>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 <p>After 4.3.0, the developer population remained fairly stable around
68 an average of about 250 participants.</p>
71 <p>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 <p>The growth trend in code size looks sublinear, perhaps logarithmic.</p>
78 <p>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 <p>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
85 exponential) rate.</p>
87 <p>There are some other pages doing similar things:</p>
91 <p><a href="http://kitenet.net/programs/debhelper/stats/">Here</a>
92 are growth statistics on the debhelper packaging utility.</p>
95 <p><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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103 <td width="30%" align=right>$Date: 2002/07/28 09:42:58 $
107 <ADDRESS>Eric S. Raymond <A HREF="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@thyrsus.com></A></ADDRESS>