Estimating Usage of Open Source Projects
Sophia Vargas, Georg J.P. Link, J. Lee · 2024
While open source projects can benefit from usage telemetry to understand their impact, privacy concerns often arise. This paper explores using publicly available metrics as proxies for actual usage data. Using the Flutter project as a case study, we found a strong correlation between these public metrics and Flutter's active user count, demonstrating that such publicly available metrics can offer insights into project usage while respecting user privacy.