Re: 1 year release good enough.
On 01/01/2012 07:28 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
> "dE ." <de.techno@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-10/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm
>
>> You might have 60% usage of Debian but for the world it's 0.02%.
>
> I've never been fond of putting too much weight on this sort of
> statistic.
>
> One of the delightful things about Debian is that the project consists of
> a group of people who are working together to create something that,
> primarily, we all want to use. Making it usable for everyone else as well
> is, of course, a wonderful goal and something that many of us care a lot
> about. But I think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that
> world-wide adoption on the order of Windows is not a requirement for the
> Debian project to be a success.
>
> Debian is successful every time I boot a system and it's running Debian,
> every time Debian solves my problems, every time I can fix something I ran
> into because it's Debian and I can help make it better. It's *fun* if I
> can get more people to use Debian, and it's important to have an influx of
> new blood and new ideas to keep Debian fresh and responsive, but that's
> about *keeping* Debian successful, not about *making* Debian successful.
>
> If we have enough developers to maintain and improve Debian even at the
> rate that we're maintaining and improving Debian today, to me that's a
> success, and I don't really care whether that number ever moves off of
> 0.02%. One of the great things about free software is that we're not a
> business: we don't live or die by market share, we aren't going to get
> bought out by someone else if we don't become a big enough fish, and we
> don't have to grow 10% a year or implode. It would certainly be *nice* to
> attract more people and more users and improve even faster, and I
> certainly wouldn't want to stand in the way of that, but it's not part of
> my metric of success.
This was so nice, I am sure you all liked reading my quote again ;) The
very personal/metaphorical successometer of Russ during does not allow
any statistics. Anyway, do we have any numbers that are indicative of
what we consider successful? What comes to mind are
* popcon - the absolute numbers we do not are so much about
* popcon.ubuntu.com - the more frequent release cycle variant of us
* developer distribution http://www.perrier.eu.org/weblog/2010/08/07#devel-countries-2010
* fresh blood http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMaintainer
* the number of blends http://wiki.debian.org/DebianPureBlends
And then there is the social side
* traveling somewhere meeting other DDs
* bringing scientists and techies together
No idea how to score anything like that.
Well, if I have forgotten about anything ... tell me.
Cheers,
Steffen
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