So here’s a question I get asked a lot: “How big is Django’s community?”

Anyone who works in open source knows that it’s basically impossible to know the size of any open source community. It’s easy with commercial programs – just look at the sales numbers – but since F/OSS is freely (and widely) available, there’s almost no way to know how many people are using your project.

Still, the tie-wearing enterprisy business folks ask these types of questions, and it’s useful to have an answer ready. What follows is a slightly adapted version of my standard answer.

In March of 2007, I attempted to measure the size of Django’s community. That March turned out to be a major inflection point in Django’s growth: the release of 0.96 brought a lot of new features – testing and the new forms library being the critical ones – and those in turn brought in a lot of new users. Growth since then has been at a much faster pace.

So I thought it’d be interesting to review the same metrics I used back then. I was quite curious to see what’s changed, and by how much.

In 2007, and again in 2009, I made an attempt to measure the size of the Django community. By popular request — okay, a couple people asked for it, whatever — let’s do this thing again.