I agree with Josh : the number of downloads is not relevant for us. Just
like the "market share" estimations always fail to demonstrate
PostgreSQL presence in the industry.
However we need to provide numbers to represent the growth of our user
base. There's tons of blogs saying that PostgreSQL is wonderful but when
MySQL announces 70000 downloads/day or when Oracle says they own 50% of
the market, we are speechless because we don't have anything to oppose
to this.
I thinks we need to define new metrics to monitor the evolution of the
project in the industry. It's not easy but there must some way to mesure
that. For example, the job trends or ML traffic could be more
informative that the download numbers...
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=postgres%2C++oracle&l=&relative=1http://markmail.blogspot.fr/2008/02/postgresql-more-traffic-than-mysql-and.html
Any other ideas ?