2/3: What people want Openmoko to do?

[Wolfgang Spraul]

Rod,
your questions touch marketing territory but I will still try to answer.

> It would be very interesting to see the graph of mailing list member
> numbers over time and whether it has just not grown very much since  
> the
> launch or whether it grew significantly and has shrunk since.

I think roh+gismo can give you more accurate information, because they  
look at this more often (it's not a secret, I wish we could all easily  
see live stats).
I believe the announce list has stayed roughly the same over time.
There has been a shift from the community list to devel+kernel.
The bottom line answer to your question is that the numbers "have not  
grown very much", not "grew significantly then shrunk".

To put things into perspective, I can tell you that we have sold more  
than 5000 units, but not many times more than that.
Compared to the number of phones we sold, the community looks very  
healthy to me. Our main focus should be to get hardware and software  
quality up, better design, low price, 100% open.
Wolfgang

On Oct 12, 2008, at 6:22 PM, Rod Whitby wrote:

> Wolfgang Spraul wrote:
>>>> Openmoko — how many are subscribed to your email lists?
>>
>> announce: 11187
>> community: 2240
>> devel: 1218
>
> I'm surprised that the community and devel numbers are so low
> considering it is almost 2 years since launch (for a data point, the
> nslu2-linux project grew to 9000 members on the community list in two
> years after project start, peaked to 12000 after 3 years and still has
> 10000 after four years).  One needs to wonder why the respectable
> announce list numbers haven't been converted into respectable  
> community
> and devel list numbers ...
>
> Surely you've sold many more than 5000 devices (supposedly mainly to
> developers) - how come all those people are not on the mailing lists?
>
> It would be very interesting to see the graph of mailing list member
> numbers over time and whether it has just not grown very much since  
> the
> launch or whether it grew significantly and has shrunk since.
>
> -- Rod
>
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