Project breakdown for documentation survey

The following table shows the largest categories of projects that respondents to the documentation survey said they contribute to.

Projects to which respondents contributed
Category Number of respondents
Linux 124
Perl 41
GNOME 24
Ruby/Rails 20
BSD 17
Python 10
Oracle 9
PHP 9
Apache 8
OpenOffice.org 8
KDE 7
MySQL 7
Java 6
Microsoft products 4

I had to combine many search terms to get the large Linux category, because Linux comes in many distributions. Thus, many respondents listed contributions to a particular distribution, such as Ubuntu. And some people in those communities think they're distinct. However, many respondents contribute to multiple distributions or to Linux topics that cross distributions. So I made the judgement that their documentation strengthens the larger Linux community, and that the contributions deserved to be combined.

To create the categories, I skimmed the list of responses and created a list of keywords to search for in a case-insensitive manner:

Keywords used to extract project list
Category Keywords to search for
Perl perl, cpan
GNOME gnome
KDE kde
Linux linux, suse, sled, fedora, redhat, rhel, red hat, debian, ubuntu, gentoo, slackware
BSD bsd
Oracle oracle
PHP php, pear
Apache apache
Java java, tomcat
Python python
MySQL mysql
Ruby/Rails ruby, rails
MS/Windows microsoft, ms/, msdn, windows, sql server
OpenOffice.org openoffice

[View all projects listed by respondents] My only changes to the responses were to remove a few phrases that identified individual respondents, in order to adhere to the survey's promise: "Individual responses are strictly confidential and names of participants in this survey will remain private."