OSDL and SD Times: Linux Survey Results [LWN.net]

OSDL and SD Times have released the results of a joint survey on the use of Linux in corporations. "The survey of 8,000* SD Times readers, mostly senior managers at corporations with more than 1,000 employees, showed broad and deep use of Linux in IT shops even though only a third of the companies had adopted the open source operating system as a corporate standard computing platform."

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Statistical significance

Posted Jun 16, 2003 19:01 UTC (Mon) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

As much as I would like to credit this report, this paragraph

* On behalf of OSDL, SD Times conducted an email summary [sic] of approximately 8,000 of its readers between May 19 and May 22, 2003 asking them to respond to eight questions about Linux in their organizations. SD Times has a circulation of 50,000. There were 370 completed responses, for an overall response rate of 4.6 percent.

gives me pause. A 4.6% self-selected response rate doesn't make for convincing, or even meaningful, results. It was not wrong for SD Times to conduct the survey, or to summarize the results, but it is misleading to make a press release out of it. Somebody deserves credit for reporting the numbers, but the press release should have noted that they imply the results should not be taken to mean anything.