It’s possible to show how the intended audience has developed over time, see chart above. All audiences did grow in more or less the same proportion.
This visualisation of the SourceForge data does show the overall growth, but does not emphasis relative shifts. I will do it next week.
The bend in March 2006 is the result of improved data quality, since then much less projects did not fill the ‘Audience’ field. I don’t know how this was achieved; it couldn’t be a change to a mandatory field since there were still some new projects for which ‘Audience’ was not entered.
Since Jan 2008 the number of projekts without ‘Audience’ information is rising again.
In this view each project counts as one. This is ok for a first try. But nearly half of all projects have not released a singe file. The chart will look different when the relative importance of projects is considered.
It could be interesting to overlay the audience data with the number of downloads (as approximation for importance from a user point of view) and with the number of file releases (as approximation of development activity).
