Hi, This email is about recent Sage download stats, and ends with an estimate that there are currently perhaps about 5000 Sage users.
Here are the download numbers for Sage during the last 6 days from the three sites (sagemath.org, sage.math, and modular.fas.harvard.edu) that I administer: Linux Binary 26 OS X Binary 12 Source 85 VMware 78 TOTAL: 201 downloads UPGRADES: Here are the number of "sage -upgrades" during each of the last few weeks: This last week: 135 Previous weeks: 337, 302, 163, 349, 307, 228, 338, 375, 336, 388, 355, 348, 398, 297, 363 CONCLUSIONS: 1. There are probably 100 downloads/week from all the other 4 mirror sites combined (probably a conservative estimate?), so that's about 300*4 = 1200 downloads per month. 2. There are also about 1200 upgrades per month. 3. Adding 1 and 2 we get about 2400 times Sage is installed or upgraded per month. 4. In my experience with both research mathematicians and students (and my own personal experience), people do not upgrade regularly unless forced to or actively working as developers on projects. Upgrading can break things they are doing, and that can screw up their workflow, so they put it off until they have some free time (e.g., spring break, finals are over, whatever). Such free time occurs maybe once every 2 months on average. If n people use Sage and upgrade/install once every 2 months on average, and there are 2400 upgrade/installs per month, then there are probably about 2*2400 ~ 5000 sage users. If anybody else has ideas about estimating the number of Sage users, please feel free to share them. --- If the above measure of number of users seems at all reasonable to people who are much better at this sort of thing (statisticians? marketing droids?) then we could use them as input to a 2008 goal to raise the number of Sage users (as defined by a metric as above) to 10,000. By the way, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab all claim to have in excess of 1,000,000 regular users... That is definitely the size of use base Sage aspires to eventually have. Estimate of number of Sage users by year: Feb 2005: 3 Feb 2006: 100 Feb 2007: 500 Feb 2008: 5,000 Feb 2009: 10,000 (Goal) Feb 2009: 25,000 (Goal) Feb 2010: 100,000 (Goal) Feb 2011: 1,000,000 (Goal) Judging by my estimates for Maxima and other open source math software projects, I think getting over 10,000 serious users for an open source math project is already a quite difficult thing to achieve, since it starts taking one outside the realm of niche market. Sage has definitely not achieved this (yet). Going from 10,000 to 25,000 will be quite difficult as well. Going from 25,000 to 100,000 will be crazy hard since by then Mathematica/Maple/Matlab etc. will have taken serious notice and start fighting back (hopefully by innovating, e.g., by geatly improving their exact linear algebra, group theory, etc. functionality). And also the range of people one has appeal to is much larger. On the other hand, 25,000 people will be telling their friends.... Going from 100,000 to 1 million users would be quite interesting. There are massive infrastructure and support issues, and the user base is the same as Mathematica. That means the daily traffic to sagemath.org could be about the same as during the slashdotting, i.e., completely unsustainable without a lot of reorganization. That means there would be substantial demand for seminars and training courses and other forms of support. There's no way this will work unless we organize some sort of international network of local people to help out with such activities for Sage. This is also the point where Sage would genuinely have reached the goal of providing a "viable alternative to Maple, Magma, Mathematica, and Matlab" for almost anybody. Without a lot of hard work and effort by us, though, the user base could easily shrink into the low hundreds again, so let's keep working very very very hard. -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
