Michael Dolan Dot Com

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Fedora Core 6 lands on systems from over 1M unique IPs in just 74 days…

Saw this debate over at /. and thought I’d chime in with a comment. First, this is unique IPs… that would mean 1 count on FC6 servers would be 3 Linux systems in my house. Now I happen to run OpenSUSE, Ubuntu/FC6, and Gentoo now, but were I a straight FC user, that unique IP stat would undercount the true # of systems.

So I do think it’s ok to “count” users? First, “privacy” arguments/fears are mostly unfounded with a method like Fedora implements. Tracking unique IPs connecting to your yum server (or to your xyz server) is nothing that interferes with privacy. But it does offer an estimate into the size of the community and that lets people make informed decisions on where to invest.

If you ask IDC for the # of Linux desktops out there, it’s likely less than what Mark Shuttleworth would say Ubuntu has - and that’s just 1 distribution.

I also know other open distros are counting in their own ways, and I think all of this is good. What would be nice+ would be an automated collection process so that 1 site could aggregate all the distro stats together via an RSS/Atom/unameit feed. So take the Fedora count, add in an Ubuntu count, etc. The community could do good things by aggregating the mass # of voices out there for say hardware support from some market blinded company that won’t release Linux drivers. Once you have the hardware, next stop is ISVs who refuse to support the Linux desktop environment. Some catch flack over it when users voice in aggregate, maybe catch some bad pr, but can turn that around and respond positively.