451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
SourceForge Stats
Raven Zachary, May 3, 2006 @ 11:03 pm ETIf you take a look at the all-time top downloads list of open source projects hosted at SourceForge, you’ll see that the top nine projects all have to do with sharing music and videos. Surprise, surprise. These top nine account for over 500 million downloads! Wow. Yet, when compared to the 7-day most active or all-time most active open source projects lists, there is virtually no crossover.
The projects that people want to download and use aren’t in sync with the projects that people want to participate in. Ok, this may be obvious to some of you. Does a P2P client or a CD ripper really need a large, robust open source development community? No. The ratio of developers to downloads for the top downloaded applications is way out there.
SourceForge exists not just to facilitate community development, but to facilitate downloads. There is a large user population that interacts with SourceForge only as a download site for consumer applications. SourceForge mirror sites embracing support of open source development end up acting as download mirrors for applications that have questionable use (by some accounts).
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