Re: How popular is Debian (popularity contest)
Jaap Haitsma <jaap@haitsma.org> said on Sun, 08 Aug 2004 13:02:12 +0200:
> William Ballard wrote:
> > On Sun, Aug 08, 2004 at 12:19:54PM +0200, Jaap Haitsma wrote:
> >
> >>Are there only around 1000 debian users on the world (assumption 60% of
> >>them sends reports)
> >
> >
> > Why would you assume that? I don't use popcon; it's possible that 99.9%
> > of users don't use it. Who knows?
>
> Oops, I meant to write 10,000. The worst case is that there are only
> 6000 Debian users around the globe. So I thought maybe not everybody
> sends reports. So maybe there are 10,000 users. That seems to me like a
> very low number. There are around 500M people on the Internet. According
> to Google stats 1% of them is using Linux. So there are around 5M users
> of Linux. Then only 10,000 out of these 5M are Debian users!!! That
> doesn't seem right to me
I still suggest you are several orders of magnitude out. I doubt 10%
of people use popcon (maybe not even 1%). It's only good (perhaps) for
finding out relative popularity of packages, since its use is not
mandated.
Even for relative popularity, there are still going to be biases (what
kind of user uses popcon? Maybe home users, possibly developers,
probably not syadmins) that make popcon not a very scientific survey.
--
TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/
TELESCOPE, n.
A device having a relation to the eye similar to that of the
telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a
multitude of needless details. Luckily it is unprovided with a bell
summoning us to the sacrifice.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
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