Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1998 17:05:52 +0100 From: Ben Smithurst <ben@scientia.demon.co.uk> To: Mark Jacobsen <markj@oreilly.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: question Message-ID: <19981001170552.A26263@scientia.demon.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19980930150409.00818be0@rock.west.ora.com> References: <3.0.5.32.19980930150409.00818be0@rock.west.ora.com>
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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/
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