Price Per Ounce: Normalizing the Download Counter

Two things happened today that got me thinking. One, I read Alex Fletcher’s blog post on Open Source and the Numbers Game and two, I went grocery shopping (you’ll see how they’re related in a minute). As I was wondering the aisles trying to remember what I was there to buy, it occurred to me that Safeway already has figured out a way to solve the ever present, always annoying, download number game. Yes, folks, a game. This means that while its somewhat indicative, and mildly amusing, tracking download counts is in no way a real diagnostic of a project’s success. When there’s money involved (as there always is in Commercial Open Source companies), there’s a built-in incentive to use raw download metrics as evidence that one project is ‘taking off’.

4 comments March 26th, 2007 javier