*BSD News Article 57007


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From: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,alt.os.linux,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc
Subject: Re: a monthly FreeBSD magazine (and other *BSD's too)
Date: 16 Dec 1995 07:38:43 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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In article <4atq47$l46@agate.berkeley.edu>,
Nick Kralevich <nickkral@parker.EECS.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
>Can you please list the source of some of these "independent estimates"?

Several people have done surveys and presented their results in this
newsgroup, though those results are now so out date as to be useless and I
won't insult anyone's intelligence by presenting them here (I would also
appreciate the same courtesy from you - see below).  As I said, I'll see
about conducting another census as it would appear to be high time for one.

>As for the Linux estimates, I present you a list of sources:

Those aren't sources, those are flagrantly misrepresentative *attempts*
to gather census.  I would be embarassed to attach my name to any of them.

>   I estimate this as being between 0.2 and 5% of the total number of 

How kind of you to "estimate" this for us.  "50 people responded to my survey,
and I conveniently estimate this to be (holds finger in the air) oh, .001%
of the total population, so we have 5 million users!  How about that!"

This would appear to be a classic case of "lies, damn lies, and statistics."
Give me a break!  You request that I cite my sources, as if by inference
you were blessed with accurate user data on the Linux side, then you pull
the freshman stats trick of taking a set of numbers and biasing them by
a wholly unfounded and unprovable "fudge factor" to support your case.
Uh huh.  Save it for somebody more gullible.

The truth of the matter is that NOBODY knows accurately how many FreeBSD,
NetBSD, 386BSD or Linux users are out there.  Nobody.  It's not even possible
to estimate within a reasonable order of magnitude given that there are no
sales receipts, no aggregate records kept for each and every download from
each and every mirror site, no yearly user census.

About the best you can hope for are *minimum* values - how many CDs were
sold, how many users belong to all user groups world-wide and how many people
subscribe to focus group publications.

I only hope for your sake that you're not taking stats at Berkeley, or if
you are that you've at least the got the good sense to go into economics
afterwards.  Then you can spend your days debating bogus figures you know
nothing about with the other economists and leave the rest of us in peace!

					Jordan