How many FOSS developers & users Worldwide?

Alexander E Genaud alex at genaud.net
Sat May 12 14:11:03 CEST 2007


I agree, you'd have to define FOSS, developer, and user.

I've been happy to participate in FOSS-like surveys in the past,
though I've never received a copy or link to the subsequent thesis
papers (even though I've always made that the condition upon which I
would participate -- so, in that way, I felt exploited by the
open-source research). Anyway...

As a global phenomena, I believe, finding any reliable numbers would
require a massive undertaking. For example, I think you'd have to ask
a large set of questions to establish the various gray zones of usage,
particularly considering most users do not know what they use (TCP/IP
might be considered open source) nor considered things in terms of
proprietary or open (the village water pump might be open source).
Without an army of surveyors, I don't know how you could generalize
the various demographics across the globe?

Having said that, I would say, based on my definitions, there are
roughly 6.5 billion FOSS users and perhaps 650 million FOSS
developers, and maybe only 65 million who think of their actions in
those terms.

Alex
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> ---------- Videresendt meddelelse ----------
> From: Gabriel Ambuehl <gabriel_ambuehl at buz.ch>
> To: community at lists.openmoko.org
> Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 11:16:27 +0200
> Subject: Re: How many FOSS developers & users Worldwide?
> On Saturday 12 May 2007 11:07:19 sean at openmoko.org wrote:
> > Dear Community!
> >
> > Hopefully you guys can help me. I'm trying to find the number of FOSS
> > developers and users worldwide for some marketing related presentations but
> > just can't seem to find any solid numbers. It would also be very
> > interesting to see how this number compares to the number of developers
> > worldwide.
> >
> > Does anyone have any good links they could send me?
>
> I dont think any reliable data exists, but as far as users go, Firefox market
> share might give a lower bound that should not be too far removed from the
> truth.
>
> However, I think you first need a definition just what constitutes a OSS user
> as technically, all OSX users use Webkit which is OSS (there are numerous
> other examples like that).
>
> As for developers I don't really have a good idea, but you could start with
> looking at sourceforge stats maybe?




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