[R] Size of R user base

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Not really.  We have looked at that in the past, but 

- unsuccessful partial downloads can account for a high proportion of 
download attempts, and it is hard to tell from the httpd logs exactly 
which were successful.

- one would have to do it on all CRAN mirrors.

- the number will be a serious underestimate due to the prevalence of
caches.  (Once anyone in .ac.uk or on my ISP .ntl.com downloads it, it is
likely to be grabbed from the cache for the next week at least.)


Of course, once you have #downloads, it tells you little about
#installations, and that tells you little about #users.


It seems to me against the spirit of Open Source software to attempt to 
monitor distribution.  We could ask R to `call home' on first use (in the 
way e.g. pine does) but I suspect many users would find that 
objectionable.


On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, BXC (Bendix Carstensen) wrote:

> I wonder if there is a count of the number of downloads of 
> each version of the R installations (for example rw1090.exe)?

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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