CURRENT USAGE NUMBERS

    If we ignore the startup phase data from 2002 through 2004 and only
    view the data from the last 11 months we see the following Blastwave 
    software package download numbers : 

    +--------+------------------+
    | Month  | Actual Downloads |  This is package download data from
    +--------+------------------+  only one of thirty mirror sites.
    | Oct 04 |    184,536       |
    | Nov 04 |    283,974       |  This data is from the largest of the
    | Dec 04 |    227,369       |  mirrors and thus it would be reasonable
    | Jan 05 |    289,137       |  to apply a factor of two in order to 
    | Feb 05 |    301,245       |  achieve a conservative estimate of 
    | Mar 05 |    326,667       |  total software package downloads from
    | Apr 05 |    270,615       |  Blastwave.org.  We need to keep in 
    | May 05 |    325,730       |  mind that this is data from only 11
    | Jun 05 |    327,635       |  months of this 34 month long project.
    | Jul 05 |    310,067       |
    | Aug 05 |    493,371       |
    +--------+------------------+
    |  Total |  3,340,346       |
    +--------+------------------+

  

    It would be reasonable to assume that the user base is many thousands
    of users however exact numbers from the open source world are not
    possible.  User base measurement and data collection methods would 
    need to be applied and then data collected over a extended period of
    time.  

    The entire cost of operations for Blastwave is less than the cost of
    a single software engineer employee and results in a software service
    to a user base of many thousands.  The actual documented download 
    flow of millions of software packages per year indicates clear adoption
    and acceptance by the user community as well as project success.

    Dennis Clarke
    Director Blastwave.org