Who should use all the software, which is available at SourceForge?
Each project has a field ‘Audience’ where the project leader can tell what the target market for his software project is.
When someone searches for a project he can use the Audience field to filter projects.
It’s not required to enter audience information for a project, but only a quarter does not have this information.
It’s allowed to select up to 6 ‘Audiences’ from a given list of 19 entries.
This list is inconsistent, because it mixes user types (developer, end user, sys admin) with branch of trade (manufacturing, aerospace) und profession (quality engineers).
But nevertheless, this is the list:
| Audience | Number of projects | % |
| No topic given | 34601 | 23.3 |
| Developers | 38207 | 25.7 |
| End Users/Desktop | 32527 | 21.9 |
| System Administrators | 10392 | 7.0 |
| Advanced End Users | 7185 | 4.8 |
| Science/Research | 5298 | 3.6 |
| Other Audience | 5075 | 3.4 |
| Information Technology | 4813 | 3.2 |
| Education | 4752 | 3.2 |
| Telecommunications Industry | 1162 | 0.8 |
| Customer Service | 834 | 0.6 |
| Financial and Insurance Industry | 681 | 0.5 |
| Non-Profit Organizations | 675 | 0.5 |
| Quality Engineers | 666 | 0.4 |
| Healthcare Industry | 562 | 0.4 |
| Manufacturing | 465 | 0.3 |
| Government | 304 | 0.2 |
| Religion | 233 | 0.2 |
| Aerospace | 154 | 0.1 |
| Legal Industry | 125 | 0.1 |
| Sum | 148711 | 100 |
The top 4 entries make 60%, which is audience by user type.
The top entry with 26% is ‘Developers’. This is an expected result. A lot of projects are developed by developers for themselves.
After the success of Linux and open source programs for the server like Apache the desktop was seen as the next frontier, the current share is 22%
Industry specific software is rare, for all industries together less than 5 %.
It would be interesting to know if the share of projects for developers was higher in the past. I guess that it was a bit higher.
Over time an idea like ‘open source’ reaches new target groups. This means that the people using open source software now are different from the open source users 10 years ago. This should have an impact on the kind of new projects started.
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