Antonio Olivares wrote: > You are correct. It will be impossible to find out > the exact number of installations. No matter what > they do, users will decide whether they want to do > anything that is asked of them. The point is not to find out the exact number of installs, but to get a ballpark figure. Even knowing to within "times or minus two" (e.g. "500 000" means "somewhere between 250 000 and one million"). Karsten Ward wrote: WHY ARE METRICS SO IMPORTANT? Really, this question should be asked this way: "are metrics so important that you're ready to risk alienating some users and contributors to get them?" And the answer to that question, from my perspective, is "yes". Why? Because, like it or not, every funding conversation inside of Red Hat's walls begins and ends with metrics. If it isn't measurable, it doesn't exist. Fact. This is especially important in the case of Fedora, because Fedora doesn't make any money directly for Red Hat. We continue to develop Fedora because it serves other purposes. Research and development. Quality Assurance for RHEL. The ethics of continuing to provide free software, which is important to all of us. And, most importantly from my own perspective, *community mindshare*. If we can't quantify Fedora's mindshare in some way, we lose one of the *major* rationales for making the Fedora Project stronger and more independent. Every time a Red Hat executive asks "how many Fedora users are out there?" and we answer "oh, somewhere between 100k and a few million," we make it *that* much more difficult to defend Fedora from bad Red Hat decisions. -- http://lwn.net/Articles/203698/ More on the rationale at http://lwn.net/Articles/203694/ . One thing that I think hasn't been mentioned -- how commercially important is it to have Open Source drivers? If Ubuntu will provide closed-source drivers on the CD, but Fedora won't -- is Fedora simply a distribution for Free Software zealots, or does the lack of open source drivers effect a lot of people? Hope this helps, James. -- E-mail: james@ | The "Power Switch" on ATX supplies, like traffic lights aprilcottage.co.uk | in Paris, really is just a polite suggestion. | -- Mike Andrews
