One year ago, talking about open source adoption in Italian Public Administrations, I reported some SourceForge traffic distribution numbers, showing that Italy was at the fourth place after Brasil.
Italy before was used to be at the third place, but the impact of open source in Brazil was and actually is, definitely stronger. Let’s have a look at the big picture, and how Europe and BRIC countries are today, as of the 29th of July 2010.
While you are looking at SourceForge traffic distribution by countries, read also the numbers.
US (blue) is at the first place, followed by Brazil (9.93%), Germany (6.46%), France (5.59%) and eventually Italy (4.28%). Globally Europe exceeds 40% of the global traffic (Western Europe ~ 16%, Southern and Eastern Europe both ~ 9%, and Northern Europe ~ 7%), while Americas are around 35% and Asia slightly under 19%.
BRIC collectively holds over 18% of the world traffic, more than USA.
Disclosure. I am a member of SourceForge advisory board.
Have you seen any changes in the traffic since Google Code started?
SF is dead, it is outperformed in many ways by Github.
SF traffic has steadily grown, but it is hard to say what it would have been like without it.
Over the last years many other open source software hosting facilities are born, but SourceForge is still the most popular, followed by Launchpad, Github, Assembla, and Codeplex.
Sourceforge has evolved into essentially a glorified downloads site, showcasing the code that’s been hosted there over the past decade. I’m not disparaging SF, we all appreciate what it did for OS in the late 90’s/early 00’s, but if you’re curious where a lot of actual open source is happening today, I can send you the traffic graphs for GitHub.
PS. Launchpad inflates their user numbers significantly, it’s fairly poor metric upon which to rank the various sites. “Launchpad creates profiles for people based on Launchpad usage, as well as information collected from public sources such as bug trackers, mailing lists, public key servers, and published application translations.” - https://launchpad.net/people
Hi PJ,
SourceForge infrastracture and services are changing a lot, and I expect SF.net to keep playing a very important role in the open source arena. But I believe also that GitHub is one of the most interesting ‘newcomers’, and I’d be open to republish its traffic graphs too.
Talking about Launchpad the greatest delusion was to sort out the hard way how it is difficult to get it running properly as an internal development system. So said, Launchpad is an open source hosting facilities with some unique features, and a broad range of projects are hosted and developed there.