Market share for an opensource software ?
We were asked by one of the members in our company, how much is the market share for the open-source software which we work on, Evolution. This was the second time, same question appeared when I was present. As Evolution is the default mail client in GNOME and shipped in many major distros like OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian etc., we said it should high enough.
But how does one estimate the market share for an opensource software ? Any statisticians who are putting those data somewhere for some popular softwares like firefox, evolution, banshee, open-office etc. after survey?
Thunderbird has a “start” page which is shown by default which is loaded from http://en-GB.www.mozilla.com/en-GB/thunderbird/2.0.0.21/start/ for example. From that they can at least get an idea of how many active users they have.
jnt
March 25, 2009 at 2:46 pm
You could look into the popularity contest thingies many Debian-based distros use. Problem is though, that you guys do not seem to have determined a proper scope: do you want to know your market share against all other mail clients? Other open source mail clients? In the enterprise? At home? Compared to web-based mail?
Besides, having it installed does not mean “using it as your prime mail client”. Or even “using it at all”…
wzzrd
March 25, 2009 at 2:49 pm
http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=evolution
http://popcon.ubuntu.com/
and I think there’s a similar stuff for fedora/redhat …
by the way they are only partial data…
scimmia
March 25, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Debian’s popcon stats might give you a good idea of relative market share on linux
nona
March 25, 2009 at 2:59 pm
wzzrd, I wanted to know as compared to other opensource mail clients on linux..
popcon definitely gives some idea. looking into it, thanks!
chenthill
March 25, 2009 at 4:16 pm
I try evolution, thunderbird, and maybe mail.app and kmail.
I’ve never seen a mail client that does what gmail does (conversation threading is crucial for me. I don’t quote text), so I don’t use them. I think it’s confusing that mailto links don’t open my gmail compose form in ubuntu like I want, and I think installing evolution in ubuntu by default is unnecessary bloat.
I’d not bet on its actual userbase to be as high as you think. That said, there are probably a ton of enterprise users out there who are incredibly grateful for your hard work, so you just keep on doing your thing.
ethana2
March 25, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Firefox usage is easiest to measure, because the user-agent string is sent to every web site it visits.
Please resist the temptation to put something similar in Evolution; people aren’t going to want some external entity knowing when they read mail.
Joe Buck
March 25, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Thanks for this post, I am interested in.
CasTex
March 25, 2009 at 6:18 pm
http://popcon2.ecchi.ca/package/evolution.html#graph-2
http://popcon2.ecchi.ca/package/thunderbird.html#graph-2
http://popcon2.ecchi.ca/package/kmail.html#graph-2
The site is a WIP but hey, shows some graphs already.
(evolution is kind of iffy because it is installed by default and if the person doesnt use it, then the number of people ‘using’ it would be weighting down those starting to… hence it falling, I guess)
Vadim P.
March 25, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Hi,
great site! very interesting!
Bye, Andrea from italy!
Andrea
March 26, 2009 at 12:19 am