[texworks] Fun facts to the 1000th commit

Stefan Löffler st.loeffler at gmail.com
Mon Apr 23 07:33:26 CEST 2012


Hi all,

I think it's time to celebrate. A few hours ago, Charlie broke the
barrier of 1000 commits. That makes 1000 changes to TeXworks since
Jonathan started it - or 1000 improvements (hopefully ;)).

I thought this would be a good time to share some fun facts about
TeXworks with you:

TeXworks has been around for a while: Jonathan started it on September
2nd, 2007

As you hopefully know, TeXworks is cross-platform and runs on Windows
and MacOS X as well as many Linux distributions

Currently, Tw is written mostly in C++ (13916 lines)

The development effort for TeXworks is estimated somewhere between 4 and
5 person-years. Which is pretty good, given that the project runs for <5
years with just one active developer for the larger part of that time
(thankfully, this situation has changed recently). Especially if one
considers that a large part of the project has not been work-for-hire
but instead been worked on in everyone's spare time.

Relatedly, TeXworks "value" (=cost of development) is estimated between
250 000 $ and 575 000 $.

TeXworks is free as in free speech [1]. It is mostly put under the
GPLv2, which means you can use and modify it as you like with very few
restrictions.

These fun stats have been brought to you by SLOCCount [2] and ohloh [3].
BTW, if you are so inclined and have an ohloh account, you can express
"I use this" there [3]. I'd be interested to learn more about the most
important asset of the projects: you, its user community. How many
people actually use TeXworks? For what work (personal/fun, university,
books, work, ...)? For what purpose? So far, interaction with you is
mostly limited to this mailing list, where people naturally typically
ask for help ;).

So, here's to the next 1000 commits and a bright future!

Cheers,
Stefan


[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre#.22Free_beer.22_vs_.22free_speech.22_distinction
[2] http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/
[3] https://www.ohloh.net/p/TeXworks


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