How many CVS users are there?

Because CVS is freely available, it is hard to know how many people are using it. This page contains our best guesses, but if you have better information, please let us know.

• The report on configuration management share which seems to be most widely cited is Richard V. Heiman, The Growing Market For Software Configuration Management Tools, International Data Corp bulletin #14385, Sep 1997. However, based on the table of contents it would appear to report sales data rather than, for example, surveying users. Because CVS sales data is scattered among various consultants and other support companies, and many users aren't paying anything at all, this is unlikely to tell us how many CVS users there are.
• There are other well-known reports on configuration management data, but as far as we know they don't include market share data.
• In the fall of 1996, there was a survey conducted on the comp.software.config-mgmt newsgroup. RCS was most often mentioned and CVS was tied with SCCS for second place. CVS was mentioned by 22% of respondents (not a market share number because some respondents mentioned more than one tool). This survey must be interpreted in a rather skeptical fashion, because of a small sample size, a self-selected sample, and the likelihood that comp.software.config-mgmt readers probably differ in important ways from configuration management users in general, but it perhaps gives some idea. The survey results can be seen here.

We suspect that CVS is one of the most widely used configuration management tools. But the available data is really too sketchy to have a very good idea.