On Mar 8, 6:38 pm, "William Stein" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If the above measure of number of users seems at all reasonable to people who > are much better at this sort of thing ....
I know the same question bother openoffice.org and firefox - they have download stats, are included in linux distributions and there are separate win downloads and silent rollouts inside cooperation. For OOo and FF, i think the best estimations finally come from the update checker. Once a week (or less often if not started, disabled in linux distributions) it retrieves the newest version number from the www. This could be done by sage, too. On the console it tells the user if there is an update available or prints out a status message on the top of the notebook. It should be able to disable it. To also count numbers behind firewalls (where many computers appear as a single IP) an anonymous uuid could be generated by sage and attached to the requested site with the version number. On the server side, access is logged and evaluated. But i don't know how important this is. More important is the growth rate, therefore download numbers and page hits are a good enough indicator, and most important market share. In the end only the market share counts... Something about OOo Market Share: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Market_Share_Analysis more reading, link points to the usage goals, but the whole page is interesting: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Strategic_Marketing_Plan#Marketing_Objectives sooner or later also sage will have to deal with some of those "boring" questions to make clear in what direction it moves. > Going from 100,000 to 1 million users would be quite interesting. > There are massive > infrastructure and support issues, ... the daily traffic to sagemath.org Yes, until then there are hopefully nice (free) services for open source products to handle traffic on a global scale. There has to be support in all kinds of languages (application itself, mailing lists, forums) and material for universities to learn how to deploy and teach sage (for a multiplication effect) But for the near future, i hope the growing rate continues steadily and new mathematica features like an interactive notebook in a webbrowser doesn't turn users away. h --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
