arda wrote:

> I've just looked at the message count over years (jan-june)
>
> 2004 : 9713 messages
> 2005 : 9695 messages
> 2007 : 4497 messages
> 2009 : 3778 messages
> 2012 : 2222 messages
>
> What do you think?

People are moving away from mailing lists, or, to be more precise,
younger developers prefer other communication channels. Especially since
there are many more websites and resources on the Internet that cover
the basic questions beginners might ask. I met a few young developers
some time ago, they asked some questions about Firebird. I directed them
to this mailing list, but they were like "Mailing list? That's so 90's."
A few days later I found their questions posted on StackOverflow website.

The way people communicate online has changes in past couple of years.
USENET is practically dead, and mailing lists are slowly decaying. Even
classic web forums are getting replaced with sites like SO or some sorts
of social networks.

If you want to track Firebird popularity, I would rather look at
download counts. Although that is not very precise to get number of
installations (you can download once and deploy thousands of copies), it
does give a rough estimate of the number of developers, as they do
download a couple of copies and that's about it.

--
Milan Babuskov

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