Estimating the usage of most open source programs is difficult, if not impossible. However, it’s important to try to understand the size of the userbase and what their greatest needs are.

InternetNews.com reports that Ubuntu Linux has 8 million active users:

“In terms of numbers we’re very confident this is an 8 million plus user base of active users,” Chris Kenyon, director of business development at Canonical told InternetNews.com. “That is a hard thing to count and there are lots of issues about methodology for counting but I have seen nothing that sheds doubts on that.”

Ubuntu and Canonical are also healthy and growing in terms of their developer communities:

“There are other key metrics that Canonical is keen to point out, among them is their growing headcount of contributors and staff. Kenyon claimed that the number of people that are actually contributing lines of code continues to grow.

“We now have over 400 active contributors,” Kenyon said. “That’s on top of our own internal development team that is now at 120 plus developers.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 3:01 pm and is filed under GNU/Linux, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.