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

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 9:09 UTC (Thu) by ewan (subscriber, #5533)
In reply to: How many Fedora users are there? by skvidal
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

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.

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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