Commit Count? Big Deal

This announcement from the PLplot project, and this report about it from Slashdot tout the ten thousandth commit to PLplot's source repository.  My response?  "Big deal!"  Both the Python and wxWidgets projects are about the same age as PLplot and the wx repository currently has almost 61,000 commits, and the Python repository has over 73,000 commits.  While those numbers are impressive considering that they represent mostly volunteer unpaid time from dozens of developers, they still pale compared to other projects.

On the other hand, the number of commits is really a very poor metric to measure open source projects by.  Much more  impressive is the number of users who would rather be using the software than anything else that could compete with it.