Slashdot Mirror
Attempts to Count Linux Users Remain Pointless
An anonymous reader writes "A great deal of attention is paid to numbers, but rarely does one actually ask what these numbers mean. One problem that many people have been trying to tackle is gauging the extent of use of Free software, including Linux. Questionnaires are not a solution here and neither are statistics, which are usually derived from the wrong data. The following article looks at the various challenges at hand and concludes that the growth rate of Linux is likely to remain an enigma."
"Do not attempt to count the number of Linux users, thats impossible, instead, try to realize the truth... there is no Linux" :-P
-Yourmomisfasterthanabeowulfcluster
World domination is at hand!
Deleted
well I skimmed TFA and conclude we can now expect in these comments:-
.. and nobody being better informed at then end of it.
(1) a lot of foaming at the mouth rants and statistics from Linux evangelists
(2) some distie bashing thrown in for good measure
(3) the inevitable vista comments and hints about massive marketing campaigns
(4) maybe some mention of PCs shipped with Linux pre-installed
(5) if we are really lucky maybe the odd referenced fact
A "Linux user" could be anything from a hardcore Gentoo-compiling mad man of a Linux user to somebody who uses a phone or other device which has embedded Linux. I for one dual boot so for purposes of this attempt at a survey am I half of a linux user? I use several devices with embedded Linux distros so am I 80% Linux user? Does the device need to be capable of browsing to a webpage or (as is cliche on /.) does it just have to run Linux?
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
I'm going to offer the same solution I did for counting Firefox users:
1) Require a national ID number to download any Linux distro, and validation of ownership of this number through an in-person meeting with the local authorities.
2) Have the software "phone home" that it's actually being used, when it's used.
3) Close the source so that 2) can be facilitated.
4) Made the ID numbers and contact information in 1) publicly available so anyone can audit the official count of users.
There, done, you've got everyone counted. Wasn't that easy?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Anyone else? Or shall we approximate the linux userbase size as being "1"?
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
Plus are you talking about just Server/desktop? If you count the millions of embedded devices that run gnu/linux I'm sure it would be considered the worlds most popular OS. It's all in how you want to swing the numbers.
Tree :)
It might not be entirely pointless to try, but I'm reasonably convinced of two things: I don't care (and don't need to) about the exact numbers, and it's growing.
I don't care largely because the software meets *my* needs. That's the most important thing to me. An assurance that it will continue to do so is also nice, and there are clearly a lot of people developing for it. I'm not worried on that front. People who have a big investment in *other people* using Linux (especially when said other people aren't developers) confuse me. (Well, except when they're trying to sell Linux software / services.)
It's growing. I can't tell you how much, but I can offer the anecdotal evidence that the responses I get to "I run Linux" have changed over the past few years. It's not always "What's that?" anymore. It's not uncommon to get questions about it in response -- people want to know how well it works, whether it runs the same software as Windows, etc. I just answer their questions and am polite and friendly about it.
I, for one, use GNU/Linux and only F/OSS
Where shall we mail your trophy?
Perhaps some kind of central server to keep track of who's using Linux? It could be called Linux Legitimate Benefit...
Take a sample of 10000 people / companies.
Ask them if they use Linux of not
Extrapolate the results.
Seems to work when there counting all kinds of other things that don't have a direct method of counting them.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
n++
That's a good way to start a Monday :-).
Actually, it's not so much that they are pointless - just that they are useless. There is a point to knowing how many Linux boxes are out there (demographic studies, confidence in support longevity as a function of install base, etc.) But most known techniques for counting remain useless.
To be honest, this might be just as well. Any technology that COULD count successfully all the Linux boxes out there would be a bit scary - many people probably don't WANT anyone to be able to know what they are running. (OK so nmap can probably figure out anyway...)
Large scale counts like this are a difficult proposition - the only things that approaches being successful in this respect are probably automobile registration systems, census systems, and the tax system - in other words, massive systems with compulsary reporting for every existing component member.
Now, of more interest might be to work with the BSA for a while (or someone else who has the authority to open random IT doors at random) and do an anonymous study of deployment percentages at random under guise of a random license check or soemthing. Probably (hopefully!) not legal but it would be a way to get statistically meaningful results if the sample was chosen well.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Tally every PC sold where the customer asks "The wireless card on this notebook doesn't have a broadcom chipset, right?" or "Do you have this model with an NVidia card? ATI is dead to me"
Desktop liberation is important because it prevents sabotage in other seemingly unrelated areas like, power management and portable music players. As long as M$ has the lion's share of desktops, they can put pressure on vendors, equipment makers and even on line service providers like Google. Everyone else loses when M$ wins.
This power is severely degraded now, thanks to Vista and Apple. When you combine Apple's 10% share with the GNU/Linux 5%, you get numbers that have bottom line implications. That goes double when all the "decision makers" are in that 15%. The bottom line is performance. M$ suffers as much or more than anyone else from their attempts at sabotage because the kludges add up to workarounds, bloat and instability. These things show painfully in Vista and it's hurt sales.
Despite the attempts at sabotage, GNU/Linux continues to work better than other software. This is key to both adoption and motivation. Desktop adopters get systems that are light years ahead of others for networking and stability, without losing applications and features. Vista is not much better than XP, but the average GNU/Linux distribution is better than both. The average Windoze user has a spectrum of ageing, non free software that has trouble talking to itself, much less sharing files across a home network or the internet. Purchasing Vista and a $400 office suits does not improve the situation for them, it just adds another box that won't talk to the others. Replacing everything with free software fixes every computer in the house. The sooner the end user moves, the better off they are.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
20,000 Linux users per thrown chair (potty mouth == 5,000/word)
and we'll conclude 18% of the world uses the CowboyNeal Microthreaded Kernel fork of Planet Nine
(6) in soviet russia, ...
(7) profit
(8) someone will smugly summarize the whole thing in one post
That's the whole problem. If I count home and work, I have more than 20 linux "servers" of which one is a cluster containing twice that many machines. But I'm the only person who uses them (well, the only person who directly uses them, e.g. logs into them), so really, in terms of users that's just 1...You can't count everyone who goes to a webpage, or uses a bind, ntp, samba, squid, etc service to be a linux user.
That's why it's hard to count. Windows users are easy: it's almost all 1 to 1. I have 1 windows machine, so mark me down for 1 in the windows category as well. You can be even more specific and count windows licenses; this is misleading...My workplace has a great number of unused windows licenses...But it's a good number with documentation behind it, whereas linux can only count support contracts with big linux vendors.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
2) Have the software "phone home" that it's actually being used, when it's used.
Yes! Every day Linux Genuine Advantage helps customers all over the world who are victims of software piracy get genuine. If you got your Linux for free, you should upgrade today to get the following exciting new features:
- Closed source, for extra Security Through Obscurity(tm),
- Compatibility with the latest viruses and malware,
- Innovative new Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to help you manage your digital rights,
- DirectX 10.
Anyway, you don't want an OS that was written by hackers, do you?>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
For those boggling over WHY this matters, try and keep in mind that Microsoft, Apple, et al provide these figures regularly. Whether or not they're valid is a source of debate, but some kind of numbers are out there. This is how we get to say things like 'Windows is 90% of the market', etc.
Perhaps we need a 'BeCounted' daemon that merely tracks the stats of those that would like to be counted? It would still be a fraction, but if that number were out there we'd at least have some kind of data point to discuss. Perhaps FSF or GNU or some other party would host the servers that collect the data? You could even make the thing multi-platform, reporting on specific apps, and providing other useful data and pitch it to Google and company. Not that they're not already tracking this in their own apps, but this would be OSS. You could have all sorts of opt-in/opt-out toggles for it and it would be transparent as to what it tracked. You could also have it gather from different places and homogenize the data after it was submitted. The possibilities abound.
Maybe there already is such a creature? If we supporters of Free-with-a-capital-F want to be relevant moving forward, a detailed head-count could certainly be a step in the right direction.
Take a leaf from the MPAA and RIAA and extrapolate the losses from Microsoft's profits.
As a game developer creating a cross-platform game client that can run on Windows, Mac and Linux, I am definitely interested in the number of "Linux Users" as I evaluate cost of development targeting and supporting Linux and the expected number of players I will get from that effort. What I am personally not as interested in are the number of "Uses of Linux"; however, if I were a tools, library or utility developer I would probably definitely be interested in the total amount of "Uses of Linux" when considering whether to spend my development time targeting that platform.
For me personally, the number of web servers or embedded devices using Linux doesn't mean anything. My car's navigation system must run some sort of operating system, however, I wouldn't consider myself a User of that OS though it certainly is a Use of that OS (whatever it might be). I didn't purposely choose my Nav system because it ran a particular OS, it simply came with whatever it came with and I use it just like I would use a phone or a washer or refrigerator with some embedded OS.
I would feel the data would be useful if broken down into at least two broad categories:
1. All uses of Linux.
2. Users who knowingly and purposely choose Linux as their OS of choice. Presumably this would be a subset of data from #1 and would useful for consumer application developers.
Runesabre
Enspira Online
You know what people, almost all user-active-machines are often also used for some surfing, so what's the most visited web-resource ? I think it's really the google homesearch page... Maybe they can help to have a more-reliable estimate...
It seems to me that Linux is growing at a pretty good clip, and any numbers you can come up with (downloads, random surveys, browser usage, etc) would show that. This whole article just reads like they're whining because they can't get the numbers they want. What exactly are they looking for?
So long as Lunix remains a third-tier OS which an average user has no chance of installing, the numbers are irrelevant.
Some people are using Lunix for servers. That's it. It has no acceptance as a desktop OS, due to it's inability to autodetect and autoconfig hardware, and it's failure to provide easy (read: non-CLI) software installs which don't require manually fixing the "always first time failed" install.
It's also pretty disgusting how Apache, Lunix's so-called "killer app", can't even install correctly without requiring a manually fix.
It's going to be hard to gain any market share when they haven't even caught up to Windows 95.
Oh sure. Throw in a toally unproven technique. When I tried asking that with spotted owls, all that any of them said was "Who?"
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
duh! nmap -sO 0.0.0.0-255.255.255.255
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
I love Linux, I think it's great. I run Slackware and Ubuntu; and I'm going to purchase that cool new Linux-phone real soon. What I *hate* is the way that some Linux users flat-out lie to promote Linux as something it's not. Attempts to count Linux desktop users is pointless and the primary reason for that is....nobody uses Linux on the desktop. You don't need a fancy survey to tell you that. Walk into Best-Buy and find a wireless card that lists 'Linux' on the side of the box where it says 'Supported OSes'. Better yet, ask a sales rep where the Linux section is, or if this ________ device has native Linux drivers included. I'm sure I'll get plenty of flames for this - and they'll be from the very same people that tell newbies how easy it is to install Linux, and that hardware support is *practically* just as good as Windows, and that you can do *everything* you can do on Windows, and it's just as good.
I'm sorry pal, but Linux is a success on the desktop. Through open and legitimate customer distribution of information Linux has gained a huge forward momentum. There are things that Linux does on the desktop that Microsoft can't hope to even come close to, even with the best hardware.
The problems with the guys that wrote the article are simply spreading FUD. Nothing more. Of course you can count and those counts are being done. As I stated there are approximately 100 million installs world-wide. That number will probably double to triple by the end of 2008. That's no failure.
You are just as miserable as they are. You see your future being put asunder by a superior product. Time will tell. I've been in this business for over 20 years and I know a success when I see it. Windows is on the slide. Linux is progressive. Windows will do nothing but loose share. Linux will do nothing but gain.
The more people know Linux is out there winning on desktops all over the world the more will understand that Linux is an winner overall. With a superior kernel, with hundreds of thousands of minds participating (world-wide), with superior minds coming up with superior products at a significantly faster rate of development, Linux can do nothing but win and win in a big way.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. They are being held to task on that every day. People all over the world are letting others know how and what Microsoft did and what they continue to do today by spying on you, by extorting legitimate users, by creating lock-in mechanisms in order to further their monopoly--you name it, they are doing it and it is bad.
You pal, are just strange. Don't post responses to my posts because you sound cowardly.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.