On Thu, 2009-01-08 at 10:42 -0600, Stas Kolenikov wrote: > A really good measure for R will be the total # of the downloads of > r-base for all platforms from all CRAN mirrors (and I would expect > that # can be found from the servers' logs). Given that it is so easy > to download everything nice and clean and up to date, I would doubt > anybody will be distributing CD-ROMs with R install files among > friends and colleagues. SAS (and Stata, and SPSS, and Minitab, and...) > should have their (internal) number of licenses sold (and yes those > come on the disks initially), but those are badly blurred by the > network licenses, and are commercial secrets, anyway.
The number of r-core downloads is definitely NOT representative of the number of people using R. If you use R on Windows or OS X, you will obviously download R from the mirrors. However, this methodology would effectively ignore many users of R on Linux. I use R on a regular basis and I have it installed on three separate systems, all running Ubuntu. In all of these cases, I am downloading and installing r-core from the Ubuntu Mirror in the USA, not from CRAN. Of course, the number of Linux users is miniscule compared to the number of Windows users, but I think it is safe to say the Linux users are, in general, a more tech-savvy group than Windows users and are more likely to be comfortable using R's interactive programming interface. I think it is also fair to say that MANY (though not all) Linux users would be uncomfortable installing SPSS or SAS or Stata onto their open-source system and would prefer to use R. Thus, Linux users probably account for a higher proportion of R's user-base than they do in the general computing population. . . . although I do not claim to actually know this proportion. Ehh. Comparing the popularity of computer software is incredibly tricky to do, especially when some of the software being compared in open-source. -- Insert something humorous here. :-) ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.