The first Mercurial user survey

BryanOSullivan [http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2006-April/007513.html announced a user survey] in mid-April 2006. On April 26, he collated the results and posted them.

Who responded

We received 65 responses, from 20 countries.

20	usa
8	france
5	uk
4	germany
2	canada, brazil, austria, australia
1	united arab emirates, switzerland, sweden, spain, russia, netherlands, mexico, japan, israel, czech republic, croatia, belgium

As is usually the case with surveys, we don't know how many users Mercurial really has, or what the response rate was.

59 of 65 respondents answered.

18	indicated that discussions on the Linux kernel mailing list led them to Mercurial
8	started using Mercurial because the Xen project uses it
8	discovered Mercurial during research via the net (typically Google)
5	found out via friends, coworkers, or collaborators
4	people read articles or blog postings that mentioned Mercurial
3	people saw Mercurial mentioned on the git mailing list

Interesting quotes:

I work for a small company, and we were told that we needed to be SAS-70 compliant. This brought a lot of grief to the develpment team, since we realized that our current (svn) code handling was not up to par. This started our search, which came back pretty dry. Mercurial seemed to allow us to do many of the things we were hoping to be able to do with our source code.
Ollivier Robert's [http://www.keltia.net/EuroBSDCon/paper.pdf paper on using Mercurial for FreeBSD development].
I have to admit that I was lucky enough to attend a presentation by Matt at the OLS. Though the presentation was short (around an hour), it was more than enough to get me into it.