Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 17:01:10 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> To: jmutter@netwalk.com Cc: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Slashdot responses. Message-ID: <58782.925084870@zippy.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 25 Apr 1999 18:36:22 EDT." <Pine.BSF.4.05.9904251833540.1058-100000@insomnia.local.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> I've been reading the discussion in response to the posting of the > Matrix article on slashdot. > > Could someone with the correct information reply to this one? > > I saw the marketshare figures for the last three years. Each year > FreeBSD has declined in marketshare. Only NT and Linux have shown This just plain FUD of the type you often see on slashdot in response to things (and, to be fair, it's not confined to FreeBSD articles; it seems FUDDing is a fairly common practice when you allow people to post as "Anonymous Coward" :-). Note, for example, that no direct reference is made to *which* "marketing figures" were used for the last 3 years. To the best of my knowledge, no definitive marketing figures have been available at any time in FreeBSD's history and the figures I see often quoted for Linux don't match any definition of "definitive" I've ever seen. You can count web hits or USENET articles, you can attempt to count registered noses, and you can extrapolate from CD sales and/or download statistics, but none of this means that the number you come up with will be in any way accurate. This is why most sensible people stay away from trying to provide accurate "marketshare figures" (or, worse, blindly believing someone else's) since maybe all you're measuring is how buggy a piece of software is (more bugs = more discussion = more web hits / USENET question-and-complaint threads) or how much contraversy surrounds it. And even once you've counted noses, who's to say that the number hasn't quietly doubled in the interim or that half the noses you last counted has since defected to another OS solution? "Lies and damn lies" doesn't even begin to describe the process of collecting Internet marketing data. :-) - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?58782.925084870>