On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 13:47 -0400, Jeff Spaleta wrote: > On 6/23/05, Tom Adelstein <adelste@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > A Sun market study, Canonical Ltd., Debian's web site analysis, my > > publisher - O'Reilly, former Ximian - now Novell people, the executive > > suite of Novell, IBM, a survey of users, classified information from a > > DoD study, results of a series of articles reviewing various > > distributions, Linspire, Xandros, and sampling from Linux forums such as > > Linux Questions. > > I was hoping for citations that i can get a look at with some raw data > and potentially a summary of the methodology for sampling. I'm very > interested in getting statistically verifable analysis for any usage > numbers for any distribution. I'm especially interested in any > analysis break down of ubuntu's numbers not lumped in with as a debian > aggregate. > The last publicly available data I am aware of that even attempts a > comparison... is the webserver survey of netcraft: > > http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/03/14/fedora_makes_rapid_progress.html > > I'm more interested in the raw data than the glowing conclusions. In > fact I'm really not thrilled with how fast fedora is growing in that > study of webservers. The implication that fedora web servers are going > leaps and bounds sort of worries me that hosting companies are > choosing fedora without telling customers about the support lifetime. > I really didnt expect fedora usage in the web server space to increase > as fast as it has. There's a lot of room for interpretation of that > data. But sadly its the only comparable raw data with a set sampling > methodology that I am aware of. I am of aware of the distrowatch.com > polling, but even they don't attempt to claim their poll is an > expression of real world userbase stats. At best its "popularity" and > they admit the sampling methodology can easily be manipulated by the > self-selecting participants. Remember linuxquestions.org poll.. > > http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=272090 > > what was the best distro of the year? slackware. Not to knock > slackware or anything. But that result seems to indicated a very > different world order than you are suggesting... and you even site > sampling of linuxquestions.org as a credible source. Sorry, but forum > activity just can't be used for anything more finer grained than > "critical mass" userbase analysis. > > Also unfortunately ubuntu shows up as an aggregate with other "debian" > releases so even in the very narrow scope of web servers I still don't > have publicly comparable raw numbers for unbuntu alone. We could very > well lump fedora in with rhel and get equally meaningless results > similiar to lumping all debian derivatives together. > > If you have any references to publicly available raw data, I'd > absolutely love to see it. > Even getting accurate stats of downloads is really tough. Because of > mirrored distribution and secondary torrents you have a hard time > knowing how many copies are really floating around out there. At best > you can get a nice lower-bound to know if you are getting a critical > mass of support, but anything beyond that is impossible to do > accurately with download stats. > > > -jef > Remember that Ubuntu was released in November, 2004.
