From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Oct 1 10:01:33 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id KAA22548 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Thu, 1 Oct 1998 10:01:33 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from scientia.demon.co.uk (scientia.demon.co.uk [212.228.14.13]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA22534 for ; Thu, 1 Oct 1998 10:01:22 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ben@scientia.demon.co.uk) Received: from ben by scientia.demon.co.uk with local (Exim 2.04 #9) id 0zOlEm-0006qa-00; Thu, 1 Oct 1998 17:05:52 +0100 Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1998 17:05:52 +0100 From: Ben Smithurst To: Mark Jacobsen , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: question Message-ID: <19981001170552.A26263@scientia.demon.co.uk> References: <3.0.5.32.19980930150409.00818be0@rock.west.ora.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19980930150409.00818be0@rock.west.ora.com> User-Agent: Mutt/0.94.3i (FreeBSD 3.0-BETA i386) Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Mark Jacobsen wrote: > Do you know how many people participate in the freebsd mailing lists? I'm > doing some business planning and am trying to size the existing user base. > A guess would be great! A quick check through my mailboxes for this list and -current for the last month or three reveals ... === ben@scientia[p0]:~/mail/lists$ grep -h ^From: freebsd-{current,questions}* | sort -fu | wc -l 1756 === ben@scientia[p0]:~/mail/lists$ Well it's probably a long way from perfect, since - probably not all users are subscribed - not all of those who are subscribed will contribute - people may have more than one address, or use different MUAs which send the From: header in slightly different formats. - From: may occur in the body But that only counts people who have sent messages to two of FreeBSD's lists, that doesn't include other lists and people who haven't posted in the last few months. There are probably a lot of users :-) Of course, you said you only wanted the number of participants, so (+/- a few %) that maybe what you have... I'd also like to know (out of curiosity) how many FreeBSD users there are. I think I read somewhere that 100,000 had been estimated, though that may be way out and I can't remember where I read it either. -- Ben Smithurst : ben@scientia.demon.co.uk : http://www.scientia.demon.co.uk/ PGP: 0x99392F7D - 3D 89 87 42 CE CA 93 4C 68 32 0E D5 36 05 3D 16 http://www.scientia.demon.co.uk/ben/pgp-key.html (or use keyservers) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message