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Re:Call for help: fund GIMP development and Libre animation by zanny on Saturday October 14, 2017 @03:16PM (#15473713)
Problem is no real reputable free software project (in order of rising significance) downloads, installs, or usage hours because most people that want liberated software also don't want tracking.

Also, different projects disclose their funding differently (if at all). Just in this context as an example Krita lists their monthly donations on their site but Gimp is just considered a part of GNOME - there is a Krita Foundation whereas Gimp donations go to the GNOME Foundation, so it would be hard given the Gnome Foundations budget statements to deduce what money is actually going to Gimp and what amount is coming in to Gimp.

Re:Call for help: fund GIMP development and Libre animation by pbhjpbhj on Saturday October 14, 2017 @07:03PM (#15474805)
Debian has popcon data, popcon is a default in Ubuntu I think too?

From the man page of popularity-contest:

       The resulting statistic is available from the project home page http://popcon.debian.org/.

       Normally,  popularity-contest  is  run  from  a  cron(8) job, /etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest, which automatically submits the
       results to Debian package maintainers  (only  once  a  week)  according  to  the  settings  in  /etc/popularity-contest.conf  and
       /usr/share/popularity-contest/default.conf.
Re:Call for help: fund GIMP development and Libre animation by thinkloop on Saturday October 14, 2017 @05:20PM (#15474376)
Those are good challenges to bring up.

In terms of usage, I think publicly available data can provide a useful enough picture:

- downloads

- upvotes (ex. github stars)

- homepage traffic

- forum activity (ex. stackoverflow)

- reported corporate usage

- etc.

Finding out current funding is more difficult, and seems to rely on self-reporting and trust.

If the site also accepted donations for projects, it could display which are most underfunded on its platform relative to their utility.