Hi fellow Fedora Marketeers, As we move forward in marketing Fedora, I wanted to say a few words about statistical presentation. There may be a tendency among people not familiar with the Fedora Project and its objectives to confuse some of our statistics. People often like to position Linux distributions as being in competition, which I believe somewhat obscures the commonalities of free software communities and especially Fedora's goal of advancing free software. We in the Fedora Project have a very comfortable position as a leader in technical innovation and community contribution to free and open source software. Unfortunately, I frequently encounter misconceptions about our statistics, and the amount of value we place on numbers of users or machines running our software. We continue to be completely open and transparent about the ways we gather statistics and the ways we present them. We don't document these statistics for purposes of competition, but because we believe our community and our sponsors are invested and interested in knowing some of the end results of the work they do in Fedora. We also use these statistics to help us construct and refine additional community-building strategies and initatives. In particular, there are statistics available which show the number of unique IP addresses that have checked in for updates for each of our distributions from Fedora Core 6 up through Fedora 9 and current Rawhide (and soon, Fedora 10). Although totalling those numbers is interesting, it is not meant to indicate a measure of users, only a total number of connections to repositories. We know that each of our releases tends to be installed on machines located at 3 to 4 million unique IP addresses. Some of those connections may represent a duplicated IP address from one release to the next. However, that IP address could mean: * one machine that has been upgraded to a newer release * two or more machines owned by the same person behind a NAT/router/firewall * two or more machines owned by different people behind a NAT/router/firewall * two or more completely separate sites where the IP address has been re-used (cable/DSL pool) Obviously this makes determining the total install base of Fedora across all releases somewhat difficult. We understand completely that IP address counting is not a scientifically valid way of determining a total number of users. That's why we don't claim a number of users from these counts; we only present them as what they are, sums of unique IP addresses. Anyone who's ever heard me speak to this issue knows it's never been my intention, nor interesting at all to me, to debate over user statistics. I am extremely satisfied that we have a geometrically (in some cases exponentially) growing number of account holders, contributors, and Ambasssadors involved in Fedora, all of which numbers we can openly and transparently document. This is far more compelling for the community, I think, than simply throwing large round numbers about, especially when those numbers aren't supported by completely open, transparent, and documented recording and reporting methods. Please keep this in mind as you provide feedback and information to people about Fedora. Our leadership position, I believe, is based on the total contributions our community makes to the entire free and open source software ecosystem, through our continuing, unwavering policy of upstream collaboration, and our continual efforts to lower barriers to contribution across the entire project. Thanks to all of you for being part of Fedora, and I hope all of you are looking forward, as I am, to the release of Fedora 10 on Tuesday! Paul -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
