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<meta name="keywords" content="fetchmail, growth, analysis">
<TITLE>Trends in the fetchmail project's growth</TITLE>
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<H1 ALIGN=CENTER>Trends in the fetchmail project's growth</H1>
<p>The scattergram below was made with Gnuplot 3.7 from data pulled
directly out of the project NEWS file using two custom shellscripts,
<a href="timeseries">timeseries</a> and <a
href="growthplot">growthplot</a>. If you see a broken-image icon, upgrade
to a <a href="http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html">browser that
can view PNGs</a>.</p>
<center><img src="growth.png" alt="Fetchmail trends graph"></center>
<p>The graph shows the population growth of the fetchmail project. The
horizontal scale is days since baseline, which is when I started
collecting statistics in October 1996 at version 1.9.0. Left vertical
scale is number of participants. There is one data point for each
release; therefore, the changes in density of marks indicate release
frequency.</p>
<p>The peak in the earliest part of the graph (before the note "Bad
addresses dropped") seems to be an artifact; I was not regularly
dropping addresses that became invalid at the time. Turnover on the
list seems to be about 5% per month (but that's just my estimate, I
don't have numbers on this).</p>
<p>The <font color="blue">blue scatter of squares</font> is total
participants. The <font color="lime">green scatter of crosses</font> is
the count of people on fetchmail-friends after I split the list. The
<font color="purple">violet scatter of triangles</font> is the population
of fetchmail-announce after the split.</p>
<p>The <font color="brown">brown scatter of diamonds</font> tracks project
size in lines of code (right vertical axis). The scale relationship
between this scatter and the other three is arbitrary.</p>
<p>This graph is quite revealing. Several trends stand out: </p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Over time, the project population displays rather consistent linear growth.</p>
<li>
<p>The key event in the project's lifetime was release 4.3.0 in October
1997, when I declared the code to be out of development and in
maintainance mode, and split the fetchmail list.</p>
<li>
<p>The run-up to 4.3.0 saw the most intensive spate of releases in the
project's history (the gap in that run happened when I took a two-week
vacation). It was followed by a significant slowdown.</p>
<li>
<p>After 4.3.0, the developer population remained fairly stable around
an average of about 250 participants.</p>
<li>
<p>Essentially all population growth after 4.3.0 happened on the announce list,
among people using fetchmail but not active co-developers.</p>
<li>
<p>The growth trend in code size looks sublinear, perhaps logarithmic.</p>
</ul>
<p>The linear growth trend in population is particularly interesting; a
priori we might expect geometric or logistic growth, given that the
project spreads by word of mouth.</p>
<p>It has been suggested that the linear growth rate is the result of a
situation in which both number of projects and the population of
eligible programmers are rising on trend curves of the same (probably
exponential) rate.</p>
<p>There are some other pages doing similar things:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a href="http://kitenet.net/programs/debhelper/stats/">Here</a>
are growth statistics on the debhelper packaging utility.</p>
<li>
<p><a href="http://durak.org:81/sean/pubs/kfc/">Here</a> is a page on the
vocabulary of the Linux kernel.</p>
</ul>
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<ADDRESS>Eric S. Raymond <A HREF="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@thyrsus.com></A></ADDRESS>
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