David Mandel <dmandel@transport.com> asked:
Friends of GRASS,
Speaking of the Future of GRASS, I have a couple questions.
Does anyone know if general interest has been increasing
or decreasing and by how much? This is hard or impossible to
measure, but one can get some idea by things like:
...stuff deleted.....
(2) How much has activity (number of messages) changed?
Funny you should ask this question.
Here are the number of emails to both grassu and grassp. I have removed all
non grass related postings (e.g. comments sent to this list thinking it was
about some other grass) and subscribe/unsubscribe/ping/test postings.
month emails
Jan-95 362
Feb-95 288
Mar-95 419
Apr-95 180
May-95 266
Jun-95 190
Jul-95 168
Aug-95 190
Sep-95 161
Oct-95 205
Nov-95 191
Dec-95 134
Jan-96 231
Feb-95 184
Mean is 226 and yes there is a trend in the data. However, this may well be
do to the fact that 4.1 was released near the begining of this dataset and
MANY of the postings in early 95 were bug related.
Just for the tought process.
Randy.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Randall Downer biosas@netcom.com
2194 Jones Ferry Rd. 919-968-1960 (FAX)
Pittsboro, NC 27312 919-968-0824 (VOICE)
I suspect another factor in the diminishing postings to grassu/grassp is
the movement away from GRASS, towards commercial off-the-shelf software,
by federal government agencies. I've informally noted a higher percentage
of academic and international postings to grassu-list than I recall a
couple of years ago. This obviously doesn't imply that GRASS is becoming
obsolete; rather, the user base is shifting. It would be an interesting
exercise to try to determine exactly what the GRASS user base is... don't
ask me how!!
-Malcolm Williamson
On Tue, 19 Mar 1996, Randall Downer wrote:
David Mandel <dmandel@transport.com> asked:
>Friends of GRASS,
> Speaking of the Future of GRASS, I have a couple questions.
>
> Does anyone know if general interest has been increasing
>or decreasing and by how much? This is hard or impossible to
>measure, but one can get some idea by things like:
...stuff deleted.....
>
> (2) How much has activity (number of messages) changed?
Funny you should ask this question.
Here are the number of emails to both grassu and grassp. I have removed all
non grass related postings (e.g. comments sent to this list thinking it was
about some other grass) and subscribe/unsubscribe/ping/test postings.
month emails
Jan-95 362
Feb-95 288
Mar-95 419
Apr-95 180
May-95 266
Jun-95 190
Jul-95 168
Aug-95 190
Sep-95 161
Oct-95 205
Nov-95 191
Dec-95 134
Jan-96 231
Feb-95 184
Mean is 226 and yes there is a trend in the data. However, this may well be
do to the fact that 4.1 was released near the begining of this dataset and
MANY of the postings in early 95 were bug related.
Just for the tought process.
Randy.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Randall Downer biosas@netcom.com
2194 Jones Ferry Rd. 919-968-1960 (FAX)
Pittsboro, NC 27312 919-968-0824 (VOICE)
On Tue, 19 Mar 1996, Malcolm Williamson wrote:
I suspect another factor in the diminishing postings to grassu/grassp is
the movement away from GRASS, towards commercial off-the-shelf software,
by federal government agencies. I've informally noted a higher percentage
of academic and international postings to grassu-list than I recall a
couple of years ago. This obviously doesn't imply that GRASS is becoming
obsolete; rather, the user base is shifting. It would be an interesting
exercise to try to determine exactly what the GRASS user base is... don't
ask me how!!
-Malcolm Williamson
I want to thank everyone contributing to this discussion.
I totally agree about the movement away from public software to commercial
off-the-shelf software by federal government agencies. I also agree
that this does not indicate any decline in interest in freeware and
public domain software by other people. However, this is very serious
because the US Federal government has always been a major financial
resource to freeware developers. I should know. While I haven't worked
for the federal government in 20 years, my salary has come from grants
and contracts from the federal government.
It is scary to see this resource dry up. It is also very important
to find other funding sources for freeware. The future of products
like GRASS depend on it.
Dave Mandel
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