netzooid

I think one of the cool things about open source is that you it becomes easy to metric the kind of response your software is getting. You can get a rough gauge of this through mailing list volume, the number of issues filed, the number of downloads, etc. Metrics can be misleading at times, but having metrics is definitely better than having none at all.

A couple examples:
Maven mailing list volume – Whether or not you like the project, it is clear that Maven has been very successful.

Apache Axis Issues filed – They’re in their 2000s now. (Although this can be indicative of the “bugginess” as well).

Fivesight’s PXE download stats – We see that their announcement on The Server Side corresponded to a high number of downloads.

XFire Blog Citations – Whats the response in the community like? Most of those citations are probably from me, so I guess that means I have a lot of work to do!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 14th, 2005 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.