Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1999 21:11:52 -0700 From: Josef Grosch <jgrosch@ontario.mooseriver.com> To: Seth <seth@freebie.dp.ny.frb.org> Cc: advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: User base statistics? Message-ID: <19990415211152.B46346@ontario.mooseriver.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9904151135050.32068-100000@freebie.dp.ny.frb.org>; from Seth on Thu, Apr 15, 1999 at 11:40:00AM -0400 References: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9904151135050.32068-100000@freebie.dp.ny.frb.org>
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On Thu, Apr 15, 1999 at 11:40:00AM -0400, Seth wrote: > I know this has been asked before, and I know there's more than one way to > count systems... but I really need to know how many FreeBSD systems are > out there for an advocacy project I'm working on right now. > > Some rough estimate would be ok, as long as it's backed up by some solid > statistics. I'm thinking of the following: > > "We have xxxx registered users, which we feel represents yyyy to zzzz > percent of the total FreeBSD population." > > I'm not looking for specific TYPES of servers (web, ftp, whatever)... I'm > looking for a total count of FreeBSD systems out there -- including those > not being used to provide any services, and those that might not be > directly Internet-connected. > > I remember seeing numbers SOMEWHERE, but I'm getting senile. Any pointers > would be appreciated. > > Please respond via private mail; I don't want to clutter up the list. If > a large number of people are interested, I'll post a summary. I run the FreeBSD Counter Page which is at; http://www.bafug.org/FbsdCounterPage.html As of a few minutes ago we have 37,849 registered users in our database. This database is shared with the FreeBSD project and Walnut Creek CDROM. I must admit that I have not done a very good job promoting this page. The Linux people have a counter page which can be found at; http://counter.li.org/index.html. According to the person who runs this page, he has 95,152 registered users which is 2.5 times the number of registered users that we have. Put it another way we have 40% of the registrations that he has. His guess is that there is 8 million Linux users. He has a link off the main page where he notes other guess as to the size of the Linux world but he does not demonstrate a correlation between his 95K registrations and his guess of 8 million Linux users. Rober Young, the guy who owns Red Hat Linux, has written a paper titled "Sizing the Linux Market", http://www.redhat.com/knowledgebase/linuxmarket.html Through various twists and turns of logic, some of which are "interesting" he comes up with a number of 7.5 million Linux users. I'll not go into the various numbers but will hazard a guess as to the size of the FreeBSD world. The Linux counter page as the installed base as approximately 84 time the number of registered users 95,152 X 84.076 = 8,000,000 using the same factor we get 37,849 X 84.076 = 3,182,192 So my guess, which is only good for a laugh, is that we have around 3.5 million users worldwide. Josef -- Josef Grosch | Another day closer to a | FreeBSD 3.1 jgrosch@MooseRiver.com | Micro$oft free world | UNIX for the masses To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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