How large is the QGIS community?

Question

How large is the QGIS community? Im interested in understanding the shift from traditional proprietary software to open sourced solutions.

Thanks

Answer 1

Download stats are one way to look at it: http://linfiniti.com/2011/10/qgis-1-7-0-download-stats/

There is also a user map if you are interested in geographic distribution of users http://plugins.qgis.org/community-map/

But all these can only capture a small part of the whole community.