FreeCAD reached 98,000 downloads on SF in January

[NormandC]

Hey guys,

There was quite a jump in number of downloads for the month of January 2015. Quite surprising in fact, since the last release was 7 months ago. I'm guessing the fact that the Windows development snapshots resumed has a lot to do with it, but still, we're talking about a 22,000 increase over the previous month.

In fact, since October 2013, downloads never dipped below 52,000 per month.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/free-ca ... 2015-01-16

I was surprised by another thing: Windows downloads only make up for 78% of the downloads. It used to be higher.

[jmaustpc]

That is interesting Norm.....it leads to the next question ....what is the other OSes that make up the 22%?

But then I thought, what does the OSes mean? Is it the OS that the web browser reports that is being measured here or the OS for which the download is designed? Then the Linux values, what do they mean? Since they should usually downloaded from the Linux distro directly or possibly by downloading the source code....then what about the git downloads?

Whatever way you look at this, we must have a very much larger user base than these statistics imply. Although conversely the user base would be smaller than the raw download numbers as you would have to allow for those that are new users verses those that are updating to a newer FreeCAD version.

Anyway I had a look at the OS data see the link below

http://sourceforge.net/projects/free-ca ... 2015-01-16

and here is a screen shot taken from the above URL just now

sfdlstats.jpeg (71.75 KiB) Viewed 2359 times

So when you read the above you have to wonder who and what are the 40 thousand odd Linux downloads and why would there bee nearly 8 thousand Android downloads? This is why I am thinking these must be the OS reported by the browser from which the download was made....for example people must be using an Android device to download the Windows/Apple binaries since FreeCAD does not support Android.


The high Apple numbers indicate that we should again thank Peter for all of his work in supporting of Apple!

Jim

[cox]

Google trends shows what looks like exponential growing interest.
Is the comunity ready for FreeCAD's AOL moment ?
What kind of growth could one expect with included and working Asembly and Path workbench?

googletrend.png (31.59 KiB) Viewed 2352 times

[jmaustpc]

What kind of growth could one expect with included and working Asembly and Path workbench?

The answer to that is simply that there would be so many that Sourceforge would think it was the victim of a denial of service attack.

[jreinhardt]

The relatively low Linux numbers are probably due to the fact, that most users get their software through the package manager. The size of this userbase is difficult to determine, but an estimate can be found from the popularity contest of ubuntu and debian:

https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=freecad
http://popcon.ubuntu.com

The Debian popcon currently reports that 0.84% of all popcon users have the freecad package installed. Ubuntu has 0.57%. Being conservative and assuming 0.5% of all Linux users are FreeCAD users, and a userbase for Debian and Ubuntu and other derivatives of 200 million (Ubuntu quotes 200 million users as a goal for 2015), this would be about 1 million FreeCAD installations on Linux. This doesnt seem too unreasonable. Most of these installations are probably not used actively however.

[jreinhardt]

@cox: What I find much more interesting is to compare that graph to other CAD tools:

FreeCADtrends.png (20.39 KiB) Viewed 2342 times

Of course FreeCAD is way down there, but compared to the big players who decline or plateau, it shows rapid growth.

[jmaustpc]

Seriously though, we might have a bit of problem at least with MacOSX users, they seem to be getting confused and downloading the old 0.12 version since it is not in a subdirectory.

If you look at the stats for "year to date"
MacOSX have of all types have a total download number of 2245.

So then I though how many Mac users are still downloading 0.14 verse how many 0.15dev snap shot.....some may now be surprised (or not) that only about 6% of Mac users have downloaded the latest snap shot. Personally I find that really disappointing, I see very little benefit to FreeCAD or its users in most users running 0.14 or whatever the release version is....I think this is not of benefit to FreeCAD's development because we need the bug testing to be in the dev version.

But then I noticed that the number do not add up, since the total is 2245, the release is about 1812 (a difference of 433) yet the 0.15dev is only 134! So I though where are all the other downloads? There are a small number of most of the files but then I found that 0.12 has 169 downloads which is 7.5% of the total! Presumably because it is not in a subdirectory.

So this means that considerably more Mac OSX downloaders are confused enough to have downloaded the ridiculously obsolete 0.12 than have tried the dev snap shot!

In conclusion I suggest that someone with write permissions to the FreeCAD Sourceforge project move all files into sub folders.

Jim

[jmaustpc]

@cox: What I find much more interesting is to compare that graph to other CAD tools:

FreeCADtrends.png

Of course FreeCAD is way down there, but compared to the big players who decline or plateau, it shows rapid growth.

Interesting! I wonder how those number look when you add the 1 million Linux users?

Where does that graph and those figures come from?

[jreinhardt]

Its Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends/

It is based (I guess) on the frequency of search queries, so the Linux users are included.

[jmaustpc]

The size of this userbase is difficult to determine, but an estimate can be found from the popularity contest of ubuntu and debian:

Do you know if those numbers include the PPA installation?