Are there any popularity / usage statistics available for the Free RCS/SCM/VCS systems?

Question

Are there any surveys anywhere which report on number of projects and/or people using the assorted Free version control systems?

Also interesting is if a similar survey was one over time, to see how things have changed.

Obviously, it's hard to measure this sort of thing completely accurately, but it should still be possible to get reasonable estimates.

Since tags are annoyingly limited to five items, and I didn't want a bias towards/against any of the systems, for search purposes I'll add the following: bazaar bzr cvs git hg mercurial rcs scm svn subversion vcs scm vcs popularity survey statistics
update: Very few views so far, so I'm cycling the tags to contain the main tags for each software, which might get more eyes on it. If only I could just put all the tags together!

Deceleron

Better tags would be IMHO 'version-control', 'survey', 'popularity', perhaps 'statistics' but I don't think it means whet you meant it to mean. – Prodigy

Yes, I see what you mean about statistics, I've updated the tags again as you suggested. – Deceleron

Also see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… – Cantabile

An article from 2013 suggests svn is still twice as popular as git. – Hesse

Answer 1

Git User's Surveys (2006, 2007 and 2008) did contain version about other SCMs... but this is of course biased. You can check how many people have given SCM in stack at Ohloh, open source software metric site, but I think you can check only current state. There are also results of Debian Popularity Contest (popcon); you can even find some popcon graphs somewhere; here I am not sure whether one can get historical information.

Neither of those sources is a good solution, but I think it is a start...

Added 20-05-2009:
There is also GNOME DVCS Survey results analysis (with links to raw data) on Elijah Newren’s blog (DVCS = Distributed Version Control System).

Added 28-05-2009:
There is Survey on Decentralized Version Control Systems by Brian de Alwis of Department of Computer Science in the University of Saskatchewan being run (see this announcement on Mercurial and Git mailing lists).

Sisley

Are there any published results on the USask survey? – Holliholliday

@EmileCormier: Haven't heard of any... try asking them. – Prodigy

I can think if at least 001 reasons that little endian dates are confusing. xkcd.com/1179 – Lydell

Answer 2

Wikipedia has this summary of projects and people on the popular version control hosting sites. While this is not 1:1 to version control, and doesn't everything, I believe it does cover high-visibility projects.

• Github has 7x more projects than anything else! However, the number is half cheating: ~40% are gists and I suspect they count forks as separate projects (?)
• Sourceforge, then Launchpad have way more users than others. Launchpad users include people who registered just for ubuntu bugs & translations.

Mycetozoan