On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 11:28:00PM -0700, Jon Phillips wrote:
How could we estimate the number of users of Inkscape internationally? I've been thinking about this much. How many people use Inkscape on a daily basis, or have used it?
I'm not sure what "daily basis" means, but I think it's too tight. "People who use inkscape at least one day a week on average" is frequent enough for most uses.
There must be some good statistical method for calculating how many users Inkscape has...obviously, the concept of user would need to be refined, but is there anyone on this list that could speak to this?
We know that we have at least 40,000 new downloads of 0.42 of Inkscape...which is a lowball figure for our total number of users IMO.
Could we say there are several thousand users of Inkscape?
Some statistics from Debian popularity contest:
# Rank is the ordering of binary packages by `vote' count; # Inst is the number of people who installed this package; # Vote is the number of people who have used the package in the last # month (and more recently than the last time it was upgraded) # Recent is the number of people who upgraded the package in the last # month and haven't used the package since that day # Old is the number of people who installed, but don't use this # package regularly; # No-files is the number of people whose entry didn't contain enough # information (atime and ctime were 0). Rank Name Inst Vote Old Recent No-files 1 sed 6649 6322 161 166 0 88 libfreetype6 6260 4040 1060 656 504 93 libx11-6 5475 3927 659 613 276 119 xbase-clients 4569 3453 651 464 1 1355 sodipodi 1309 210 1027 72 0 1408 inkscape 874 199 520 155 0
(I believe sodipodi is the default SVG editor under gnome, btw.)
So, of the people who use Debian and install the popularity-contest package and can send mail with sendmail and who have used X11 in the past month, about 5% have also used inkscape in the past month.
Of the people who have X11 installed, about 15% also have inkscape installed.
Note that "people who use Debian and install the popularity-contest package and who have ensured that sendmail can talk to the outside world" isn't exactly the artist demographic.
How many people use a Free Un*x system? Bryce (of OSDL) probably has a better idea than I, but google suggests tens of millions (including people whose distribution version doesn't include an inkscape package). So let's say hundreds of thousands of users (once a month or more) on Un*x.
Windows: 125 thousand downloads of the win32 0.41 binary on sf (including ppl who downloaded it for curiosity but haven't really used it since).
Inclusion in German magazines will mean a huge number of people have tried it at least once, but I haven't noticed a surge of German users in either the jabber channel or inkscape-users (both english fora, of course).
Mac: Based on sf stats, it appears we have well under 100 000 Mac users so far.
So I think we can confidently say that "there are hundreds of thousands of people who run inkscape at least once a month", and a million is still realistic.
pjrm.