I'm not in a position to have an opinion (everyone would think I'm
tainted ;-) , but I just made an interesting observation, when comparing
the size of the mailing list for creating Laszlo, to that of the mailing
list for using it:
http://www.openlaszlo.org/pipermail/laszlo-dev/
http://www.openlaszlo.org/pipermail/laszlo-user/
The mailing list volume among people *using* the system has dropped to
44K in Jan07, compared to 149K in Jan06. Similar year-to-year declines
are seen in prior months.
But the mailing list volume for *creating* the system itself has
increased, to 330K in Jan 07, from 139K in Jan 06, with slightly smaller
increases in the preceding three months.
When the two lists started, in late 2004, users outnumbered its
developers by 2:1 or 3:1. During 2005 the two mailing lists grew to
about equal conversational levels, but during 2006 the conversation
about using the tool dropped to less than half that of writing the tool.
During the past month, conversation about writing Laszlo was about eight
times the level of people actually using it.
I don't know of a similar chart of conversational levels for
FlashCoders, but there's one for FlexCoders:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/
Here, there were 3200 full messages in Jan07, compared to 1300 in Jan06.
The highwater mark was in June-Aug 06 (after the release of Flex 2) with
about 3600 separate messages per month. For the past three months
conversational volume has been about twice that of the year-ago levels.
How people talk about something doesn't mean everything about a
technology, but it's one indicator of how people regard things... take
it for what it's worth. Pretty startling changes, though.
jd
--
John Dowdell . Adobe Developer Support . San Francisco CA USA
Weblog: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd
Aggregator: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna
Technotes: http://www.macromedia.com/support/
Spam killed my private email -- public record is best, thanks.
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