How many Fedora users are there? [LWN.net]

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 5:11 UTC (Thu) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094)
Parent article: How many Fedora users are there?

A couple of things about what red hat gets from fedora and why we feel secure in our funding status:

1. Fedora Extras: Extras is massively important to fedora and to RHEL users. Find a RHEL user who hasn't grabbed or wanted to grab a package from extras to satisfy some demand and I'll be SHOCKED to see them. As has been discussed on some public lists folks are working on rebuild of fedora extras packages for RHEL.

2. Fedora devel cycle: The devel cycle that fedora offers is sooo much faster than anything RHEL could or should ever do. Getting to see how the kernel is stabilizing, getting to see what things break in the latest gnome or kde? Getting to draw off the latest and greatest version of the depsolver tools after they've been used and tested by millions of people world wide for months ahead of deployment? That's a huge win. And this is what fedora does.

3. Meta-framework tools: There's so much interesting working going into ways of rolling and maintaining fedora core and extras. So much work going into keeping the community input rolling and involved, lots of thought happening and lots of code being written - this is great.

I think we need a new analogy for what fedora is to rhel. It's not a beta test. It's the space program. When the apollo program was underway there were lots of misc projects that had to happen in order to get everything working. LOTS of them. People worked hard, worked on side projects (like cordless tools and velcro and any number of engineering feats).

Fedora Core is the creation of the rockets to try out for a launch.

Fedora Extras is the set of tools that had to be made and tested for a launch to matter: the spacesuits, the tanks of air and water. The toothpaste-tube steak-sandwich. All of that stuff

The fedora community projects: mock, plague, the voting and account system. These are the cordless tools and velcro and wd-40-like items that got developed in order to make the apollo launch happen.

So if you think of rhel like the launch and you think of fedora like the program necessary to make the launch happen then you realize two things:

1. it's terribly cool to be a part of the apollo program(fedora)
2. there's no way to get to the launch(rhel) w/o the apollo program(fedora)

That's why there's no fear of fedora's funding going away or its interest being derided. It's CRITICAL to getting the RHEL job, done.

-sv

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How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 9:09 UTC (Thu) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]

A couple of things about what red hat gets from fedora and why we feel secure in our funding status

OK; here's the thing - if Fedora feels so secure in its funding status, why the mad rush to gather some user count in a half-arsed manner, right now?
This sort of rushed, known to be lame solution looks like a crisis measure - this reasonably makes people wonder what the crisis is.

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 13:28 UTC (Thu) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link]

Well, to be fair, we've been asked to get some kind of metrics on people using fedora for 3 releases now. We've been using torrent numbers and all sorts of things but never had anything central to work from.

The mirrorlist cgi actually gave us a place where a good portion of the people would want to go where we could get some simplistic counts of people connecting.

It's dramatically better than what we had before and it doesn't give up any personal information.

So, there's no mad rush - we've had 3 releases to do it and never got around to it.

-sv

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 13:43 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

It would be much smarter PR-wise to package the klive (klive.org) client in Fedora Core and advertise it. Sure it won't give an exact user count but :
1. the counting infrastructure is not @redhat, but at a neutral third-party
2. the data gathered can actually be useful to the community at large
3. it's opt-in
4. who cares if a percentage of users slips through ? It'll still give a reasonable order of magnitude

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 14:30 UTC (Thu) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link]

The counting mechanism lives on fedoraproject.org

That's a machine donated by dell and living in a server room at duke university.

I'm not sure how much less 'at red hat' you can get.

-sv

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 10:35 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Find a RHEL user who hasn't grabbed or wanted to grab a package from extras to satisfy some demand and I'll be SHOCKED to see them.

Do my bosses count? (They don't do regular updates, either: they just got bitten by an xattr bug with a fix released in *2003*... maybe this will eventually re-educate them, but I doubt it. Of course these are systems exposed to the Internet, *sigh*...)