VideoLAN, a project and a non-profit organization.

10 years of Open Source

Welcome to the pages for the Celebration of our 10 years of open source

We are here to celebrate the 10 years of the open sourcing of VideoLAN and VLC.

10 days of surprises, ideas and stories will pop up here.


Day 9: VLC community numbers

For our 9th day, we'd like to speak about numbers.

Commiters

The number of committers metric is too often discarded, in open source projects.
We believe this is a good way to mesure the popularity of a project.

Official committers

The official commiters are the ones who have or had write access.
They are 48 of them, but most of them are inactive, those days...

External committers

The external commiters are people from the community, who send patches. There patches are then applied into the main repository, by other committers.
They are more than 500 of them, during the first 10 years of the project.

Downloads

The download numbers are always inaccurate, because many downloads are not counted:

  • Linux numbers, because users download directly on their distributions;
  • Unofficial mirrors, and direct FTP accesses;
  • Websites like download.com, CNET, 01Net or softopedia.

Numbers before sf.net

When we mainly used our own set of mirrors, we had counted 440 million direct downloads.

Those downloads were done between December 2004 and June 2010 and did not include updates.

Numbers since sf.net

Since last june, we are using SourceForge for distribution, especially in order to have a 3rd party counting the downloads.

As you can see, VLC is already at the 4th position, on the Top Downloads, For all time of SF.net.

The numbers are over 191 million, but are including signatures and updates.
The actual numbers are thefore closer to 74 million direct downloads, over the last 7 and half months.


That would make the total at around 514 million direct downloads.

Users

As VLC is not phoning home when one uses it (for example, proprietary players like RealPlayer or DivX do), we cannot know exactly the exact userbase.

We can only guess from the download numbers... Do your own estimation then :D

Support us

Since all the work on VLC and other videolan projects is done by volunteers in their free time, we welcome donations to help us manage the software. Donate now!

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