[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Roman Strobl]

Jim Grisanzio wrote:
> The plug-ins feature of NetBeans probably enables a large number of 
> people to contribute without having to touch the main code base. Is 
> that an accurate way to look at it? An companies can contribute 
> plug-ins, too, right? I think Indiana will help us engage more 
> developers who can contribute and maintain packages without having to 
> dig into the kernel source.
Yes - we get a lot of contributions as plug-ins. We also receive patches 
attached to issues in the bug tracking system. But source code 
contributions are not the only way - for example we received in past 
year 120+ docs contributions (tutorials and articles). There are other 
ways - localizations, evangelism, bug filing and fixing, NetCAT 
(community QA), etc. Non-code contributions are also very important and 
are mostly much easier to do so.
>> NetBeans user community grew 10x in size in last 4 years - 
> How many users? Are you especially strong in certain geos?
We track "connected" users - these are people who connect with NetBeans 
to receive updates. This is a very pesimistic measure because we don't 
track users behind firewalls, users without pernament internet 
connectivity, and users that disable the update mechanism. Although the 
number doesn't show the total number of NetBeans users (because of 
reasons above), it's quite a precise measure for relative growth of the 
community. We went from 45K connected users to 450K users currently 
during last 4 years. As for the countries, we do have some analysis... I 
can give you some data next weekend in Santa Cruz at the summit if you 
are interested.

-Roman