Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Popularity of Sage

This post is about Sage download statistics.

I try to track the actual download events and derive some information about them. This post is about the timerange June 1st until Aug 12th (today). The basic numbers are, that Sage is downloaded most often in the USA (35%), followed by Germany (7%), France (5%), UK, Italy, Spain, Canada, China, Brazil and Japan (4 to 2 %). On average, Sage was downloaded 150 times each day during the last semester, and a bit more than 100 times during summer break. I hope, numbers will go up again ;)

But that's rather boring and I tried to put the numbers in context. I focused on those countries with more than one million inhabitants and scaled the download numbers with the population size or with the number of internet users. To my surprise, the hit-list looks totally different now!

Download Top 20 weighted by population
Switzerland
Austria
New Zealand
Uruguay
United States
Norway
Slovenia
Denmark
Finland
Canada
Australia
Singapore
Germany
Netherlands
Spain
Israel
France
Czech Republic
Greece

I was somewhat surprised to see Switzerland, Austria and New Zealand and Uruguay on top! Concerning Uruguay, I know that they use Sage at University.

Download Top 20 weighted by "internet users"
Niger
Uruguay
Guatemala
Austria
Greece
Israel
Switzerland
Puerto Rico
Ethiopia
Mali
Portugal
Czech Republic
New Zealand
Ireland
Australia
Spain
Armenia
France
Denmark

For me, that's also rather interesting. Of course, those countries with only a few internet users are easily on top (Niger), but e.g. Guatemala has more than 1 million users and so far I have never heard of them using Sage. In this context, our top 3 from the pure download numbers are way down below: USA #23, Germany #21, France #19!

Now the important questions:
What does that say about Sage adoption? Market potential? Is Uruguay a maths country and the USA not? Does it depend on the average income, GDP, ... (Switzerland & Austria vs. Uruguay & Guatemala?!?!) ... or just statistical noise?

If you want to see the whole data: online Webpage, CSV, ODS


Update:

Here the same weighted top-20 lists for "Visits" (a session of one or more pages impressions on sagemath.org or an related website (mirror, wiki, etc.))

Visists weighted by Population:
Iceland
Austria
Martinique
Switzerland
Luxembourg
New Zealand
Slovenia
Norway
Canada
Denmark
Australia
Finland
USA
Netherlands
Germany
Spain
Sweden
Uruguay
United Kingdom
France

Visits weighted by internet users:
Martinique
Iceland
Austria
Switzerland
Uruguay
Greece
Guatemala
Israel
Luxembourg
Australia
Germany
Portugal
Slovenia
Spain
Denmark
New Zealand
Ireland
Finland
Hungary
Norway
France
USA
Canada
Puerto Rico
United Kingdom


Update: whole spreadsheet, also for visits: online Webpage, CSV, ODS

H

3 comments:

  1. Regarding the Guatemala datapoint I've been encouraging (requiring) my students to use Sage in their courses. So far I know that it's been used in Calculus, Differential Equations, Discrete Mathematics, Abstract Algebra, Signal Processing and maybe a couple more.

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  2. Developing countries have a very strong cost incentive to use Free (and free) Software.

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  3. yeahr, i'm hope and i'm sure free software in emerging countries has a good future - including Sage of course. also, due to the economy downturn, i hope more and more universities in western countries will revisit their expenses and may choose Sage.
    i didn't know that about guatemala, but sounds indeed interesting, thanks!

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