SUN Questions Eclipse Download Metrics

An interesting note from a recent InfoWorld story - Sun is publicly questioning if Eclipse download stats are accurate. I suppose the implication is that the Eclipse Ecosystem is a wild exaggeration perpetrated by the 150 member organizations upon the software world, but I digress.

Of course the download stats are accurate, and they're huge. Just to give you an idea of the volume we face, since July 1 there have been 1,515,718 downloads of the 3.2 SDK from Eclipse.org on Windows alone (add another 15% to that for other platforms). Moreover, the download stats we talk about usually don't include torrents (34,000 since July 1 2006), they don't include member downloads (reported by members to be about 80,000/month), and they don't include the untold number downloads of environments built on the Eclipse platform (like BEA Workshop or LynuxWorks' Luminosity IDE). They don't include downloads and updates from the update manager either! Moreover, when we talk about downloads we usually (wrongly) just talk about the Java SDK downloads. In just the past four weeks there have been 24,887 downloads of the C developer tools on Windows alone. Downloads of the Eclipse WTP all-in-one (SDK + WebTools) are also significant.

Live realtime download stats are available to all Eclipse Committers. If SUN would like my help walking any of their committers through the steps for getting Eclipse download stats, just drop me a line.

- Don