R in the NY Times

A really good measure for R will be the total # of the downloads of
r-base for all platforms from all CRAN mirrors (and I would expect
that # can be found from the servers' logs). Given that it is so easy
to download everything nice and clean and up to date, I would doubt
anybody will be distributing CD-ROMs with R install files among
friends and colleagues. SAS (and Stata, and SPSS, and Minitab, and...)
should have their (internal) number of licenses sold (and yes those
come on the disks initially), but those are badly blurred by the
network licenses, and are commercial secrets, anyway.

The number of r-core downloads is definitely NOT representative of the
number of people using R. If you use R on Windows or OS X, you will
obviously download R from the mirrors. However, this methodology would
effectively ignore many users of R on Linux. I use R on a regular basis
and I have it installed on three separate systems, all running Ubuntu.
In all of these cases, I am downloading and installing r-core from the
Ubuntu Mirror in the USA, not from CRAN. 

Of course, the number of Linux users is miniscule compared to the number
of Windows users, but I think it is safe to say the Linux users are, in
general, a more tech-savvy group than Windows users and are more likely
to be comfortable using R's interactive programming interface. I think
it is also fair to say that MANY (though not all) Linux users would be
uncomfortable installing SPSS or SAS or Stata onto their open-source
system and would prefer to use R. Thus, Linux users probably account for
a higher proportion of R's user-base than they do in the general
computing population. . . . although I do not claim to actually know
this proportion.

Ehh. Comparing the popularity of computer software is incredibly tricky
to do, especially when some of the software being compared in
open-source.

Insert something humorous here.  :-)