[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Jim Grisanzio]

Roman Strobl wrote:
> 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.

Cool. I'd love to know how you guys keep track of your contributions and 
how you promote your contributors throughout the world. I'm personally 
interested especially in the localizations, too.


>>> NetBeans user community grew 10x in size in last 4 years - 
> 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.

Yes, absolutely. And thanks for the information. See you next weekend in 
Santa Cruz and San Francisco. :)

Jim

-- 
http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/