When we released QGIS 1.4 in January, I decided to host the QGIS-1.4.0-1-No-GrassSetup.exe download file here on my server at Linfiniti so I could try to get a sense of how many people are using our software. Estimating users in a FOSS project is a hard thing to do – our software is free and freely redistributable so one copy of the software may make its way onto many desktops. Also some operating system’s packaging technology make it hard to track download numbers – we cant easily see how many downloads have come out of the ubuntu-gis PPA for example. But for the user profile that runs windows and doesn’t want GRASS functionality, I can reveal that the total downloads from my server for the months of Jan and Feb is:

22461

To which I can only say: “Wow! I didn’t know that many people use Windows!”