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Ubuntu, security response, and community contributionsUbuntu, security response, and community contributionsPosted Jul 19, 2008 13:46 UTC (Sat) by stickster (guest, #40146)In reply to: Ubuntu, security response, and community contributions by madscientist Parent article: Ubuntu, security response, and community contributions
Statistics gathering doesn't have to be so random and haphazard. Fedora does it openly and transparently, as described here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics The smolt project was created as a non-Fedora, cross-distribution effort to help with this need, and other distros have been repeatedly invited to participate so that we can confidently talk about the size of the overall installation/user base. Novell, for example, has recently joined in. (Smolt also produces useful hardware metrics too.) Over 15 years into the Linux story, there's no sense in making these numbers up or sticking our heads in the sand. I doubt that a driver like accurately showing market size would be considered silly by anyone basing their business on Linux. But I understand that many people would rather not argue about it; so be it.
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Ubuntu, security response, and community contributions Posted Jul 19, 2008 16:58 UTC (Sat) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] I think accurate stats are great, and I'd love to see them. I don't know much about smolt but I see no reason why it shouldn't be supported in Ubuntu. Ubuntu has already the Ubuntu Hardware Database, and it does have a nice user interface to report hardware info, but the web site seems really lame and/or broken when I checked it. There's also popcon, originally from Debian, where you can register to have the packages you use reported upstream: this is used to make sure that the CD, which has limited space, has the most popular packages installed. But you can also find out some info about how many machines are running Ubuntu: http://popcon.ubuntu.com/ The problem with these as stats gathering vehicles is that not only are they off by default (which probably every such package will always be, and I don't disagree with that) but they aren't even publicized, so unless you happen to run across them you won't use them. In order to be anywhere close to accurate there has to be more "advertising". Maybe an option to restrict the data uploaded, for people who aren't interested in publishing details but would like to be counted. I also found this with a one-minute Google search, from last year: http://www.starryhope.com/tech/2007/ubuntu-just-how-popul... I'm saying that I'm not willing to get into an argument about whether or not Ubuntu has "an impressive userbase" or not. For one thing, it's completely ambiguous--if I'd said it has 82% of the desktops then I would expect to be challenged to justify that statement. However, I believe my statement is obviously correct given any objective look at the Linux ecosystem. If we want to talk constructively about possible ways we could get more accurate statistics I'm all for that.
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