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The Cathedral & the Bazaar
book

The Cathedral & the Bazaar

by Eric S. Raymond
February 2001
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
256 pages
5h 39m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from The Cathedral & the Bazaar

Appendix B. Statistical Trends in the Fetchmail Project’s Growth

The scattergram below was made with Gnuplot 3.7 from data pulled directly out of the fetchmail project NEWS file using two custom shellscripts available on the project website.

Fetchmail project growth history
Figure B-1. Fetchmail project growth history

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.

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).

The scatter of squares is total participants. The scatter of crosses is the count of people on fetchmail-friends after I split the list. The scatter of triangles is the population of fetchmail-announce after the split.

The scatter of diamonds tracks project size in lines of code (right vertical axis). The scale relationship between this scatter and the other three is arbitrary.

This graph is quite revealing. Several trends stand out:

  • Over time, the project population displays ...

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