Re: How Many Emacs Users?

[David Kastrup]

Brad Collins <brad@studiojungle.net> writes:

> > Between 2 and 4 million I'd say.
> 
> Thanks for the replys -- back channeled as well...
> 
> This is not a life or death thing.  And it's obvious there is no way
> of determining how many people who use any flavour of Unix or
> Gnu/Linux could be using, so I think it would be better to use a
> simular approach that is used by congressional offices and say that
> for every person subscribed to a Emacs mailing list there are X
> number users who aren't.

No way, Jose.  Emacs mailing lists are for the people actually
interested in details.  But Emacs is one of the main editor
variants.  A _lot_ of people use it that would never want to even get
acquainted with it more closely.

At a time where the average Emacs user compiled and installed his
Emacs by hand, the mailing list numbers might have still had some
relation to the actual user numbers.

But since Emacs pretty much by now is a standard GNU component and
one of the default "big" editors for Linux, the silent masses are too
dominant to be discounted.

Would you estimate the number of Microsoft Office users from the
subscribers to some mailing list?

If you did, they may have already lost the desktop war.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum