Lots of times I get asked about ‘numbers’ at Eclipse. Usually people want to know download numbers. I personally don’t think downloads are a great metric for success of Eclipse. To quote a former colleague: ‘Counting downloads is like McDonald’s counting the number of hamburgers served, not digested’.
To be sure we get lots of downloads at Eclipse . However, the metrics I often use are:
- 110 member companies
- 500+ committers from 30+ different organizations
- 50 open source projects
- 950+ third party plug-ins listed on EclipsePlugins
Is there another metric that we should be tracking?
btw, if pushed I say we have had 50 million downloads of Eclipse since inception. That is the last time we added up the numbers at the end of 2004. It seems to satisfied most people but it looks like we have a long way to go to catch up to the billions served by McDonald’s.
