Open Source Floodgates
By Rob Safuto on Jul 20, 2007 in Awakened Voice, Open Source | Tags: Drupal , Open Source , Songbird , Statistics , WordPress
One of the things that absolutely blows my mind is how passionate members of the open source community are about the tools that they make and use. When I started doing screencasts last summer I didn’t really have any road map with respect to the tools that I would cover. I decided to focus on what made sense to me.
Nearly a year and twenty-two lessons later I’ve come up with a definite pattern with regards to the overall interest in the content I produce there. The material related to open source projects definitely garners a lot more eyeballs than the one on commercial offerings.
Here are some rough numbers to show you what I’m talking about.
Average downloads for non-open source tutorials: 400
Average download for open source tutorials: 5300
The single largest downloaded tutorial is my Blocks in Drupal 5 video that has attracted over 20,000 downloads. My recent Songbird tutorial is humming along at over 8,000 downloads. The lesson is two weeks old today.
Am I trying to brag by sharing these numbers? Absolutely not. There are plenty of video producers out there who get a lot more downloads than I do. My point is that the people who work with or use open source tools are a passionate bunch who have an incredible appetite for knowledge.
That’s one reason why tools like WordPress and Drupal continue to become more powerful and also more easy to use. Songbird is well on its way too. And they’re still in developer preview.
So for those of you who swear by tools that you have to pay license fees for, consider taking a second look at tools like these. And if you’re a content producer looking for topics that get attention then consider learning these systems and contributing by adding what you know to the mix. Either way I believe you will be better off in the end.
