[9fans] size of Plan 9 user base

[Richard Uhtenwoldt <ru@river.org>]

one way to estimate the size of a software's user base is to measure
the volume of traffic on mailing lists devoted to the software.

so, here's some statistics about the 9fans mailing list,
created by looking at the file size information on the
9fans archive web page http://bio.cse.psu.edu/~schwartz/9fans/

from Dec 2002 through May of this year, the latest month for which the
web page has information, there was 5.0 "megs" of traffic on the list.

that volume of traffic is about the same as that of the first 6 months
of 2002 (5.05 megs) and the first 6 months of 2001 (5.11 megs).  for the
6 months starting the month third edition was released, under the new
Plan 9 Open-Source License (Jun 2000), volume was slightly higher (5.3
megs) mostly because of very heavy traffic the month of the release and
the month after.

in conclusion, traffic on 9fans has not gone up since the Plan 9
Open-Source License, but it hasn't gone down significantly either:
latest results are only 6% less than the results for the first 6 months
of the 3d edition's release, which is probably within the range of
experimental error (from, eg, my not consistently using the same 6
months of the year).

I'm hoping that the new, open-source-initiative-approved license
will grow the user base next few years.

P.S.  tedious details.

since Plan 9 users tend to be perfectionists and I do not want to be
corrected, I point out that by "meg" this message probably means 1000*1024
bytes (because the web page's information is mostly in units of KB
but I did not want to use KB because of the false impression it gives of
accuracy).

also, there was a change in mailing list software Sep 2000 which
might skew volume a little if one software adds more headers than
the other.