One of the difficult things to track in the open source world is the number of people who actually use your software. In the proprietary commercial world you have licenses, invoices, and so forth. In the case of QGIS, we can track the total number of downloads from qgis.org, but this doesn’t represent the total installed base. It is impossible to accurately determine the actual number of people using QGIS, but we can get an approximation of the number and where they are in the world.
The analysis was done using the log files from the QGIS contributed repository:
- The IP address of each entry that retrieved the plugin list from the server represents one or more users—these IPs were collected into a unique list
- Using a Python script, each IP address in the log was geocoded to get the approximate latitude and longitude of the user
- The IP address, country, latitude, and longitude were written to a CSV file
- The CSV file was converted to a Spatialite layer to create the map of users
The map represents 35,603 unique IP addresses of users that accessed the repository between October 23, 2011 and December 17, 2011.
The geocoding process varies in precision—some IPs are located to the city level while others only return a general location for the country.
Some assumptions and observations:
- Most (maybe all) users make use of Python plugins and therefore access the contributed repository at some point
- Country-level points (blue) on the map represent more than one user
- Some points represent organizations that use a single IP for all users accessing the Internet. These points will represent more than one user
- Some users may access the repository from more than one IP address
So how many people use QGIS? At the very minimum, 35,000. We know that the downloads of just the Windows version exceeded 100,000. Given that there are 7,183 IP addresses that are generalized to a country location, we can safely assume that the number of actual users is much higher than that.
Considering the number of points that represent an organization and those that represent a country location, I think we can safely assume that the number of QGIS users easily exceeds 100,000 worldwide.
[...] Vous voulez savoir ou sont les autres utilisateur de Qgis : pas facile dans le monde du libre!!! Dans le monde propriétaire vous pouvez toujours regarder les licences. Ici ont été localiser les contibuteur de qgis et ca donne une carte http://spatialgalaxy.net/2011/12/19/qgis-users-around-the-world/ [...]
Another conclusion is that most of our user base doesn’t know about the plugins, given what I’ve seen here and there it would not unrealistic.
Thanks for this effort Gary! I would like to create a QGIS poster for conferences and it would be nice to add some user map to it. Could you send me the geocoded file?
I also agree with Jean-Roc that it is very likely that a considerable number of users doesn’t know about plugins a thus misses a lot of great functionality. Maybe a prominent link from the homepage to the plugin page could raise awareness.
[...] QGIS Users Around the World [...]
[...] “QGIS Users Around the World” Gary Sherman collected and geocoded a few weeks of accesses to the plugin repositories. This map is [...]
Thanks Gary. I think this kind of maps will make more sense if normalized for population density. Data at contry level should be easy to find.
@Paolo – Well that is certainly another type of map you could make from the data. This map shows the location of QGIS users using the best information available. Unfortunately some countries map to a single geographic point.
Very interesting information. Is it possible to download the geocoded information.