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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!jkh 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 10:35:49 GMT Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 52 Message-ID: <4au7e5$ql4@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <4ajc07$sb7@unix2.glink.net.hk> <4atq47$l46@agate.berkeley.edu> <4att23$mha@agate.berkeley.edu> <4au4fo$pbo@agate.berkeley.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: violet.berkeley.edu Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.advocacy:30495 alt.os.linux:6445 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:10563 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:1561 In article <4au4fo$pbo@agate.berkeley.edu>, Nick Kralevich <nickkral@parker.EECS.Berkeley.EDU> wrote: >In article <4att23$mha@agate.berkeley.edu>, > >Regardless of this, I would still like to see information on those >out of date surveys. Really! I am curious. I will keep the fact >that the surveys are out of date in my mind when I look at them. Well, to cite one of the very same references you cite (the "counter") its shows that there are 1294 registered users (it's misnamed 386bsd-counter at aun.uninett.no, due to the historical roots involved). 67.4% of those are claimed to be FreeBSD machines (3.0% 386bsd and 29.2% NetBSD). That leaves some 866 users of FreeBSD who are thus registered. What does that mean? I really have no idea. It could be off by a factor of 10, 100, 1000. Who's to say? Some other facts, and for business reasons I am going to be forced to be deliberately vague since such figures are not for general release. We, at Walnut Creek CDROM, sell at least several thousand FreeBSD CDs every month. On some months, this number is in the mid-4 figure range. These are new customers, and not subscription customers. That would imply that the user base is growing by *at least* 24,000 a year if you take the roughest side of my estimate and scale accordingly. The FreeBSD CDROM has been selling for 3 years now, and we don't even have the sales figures in for FreeBSD 2.1 yet (since it didn't't start shipping until today). By all conservative predictions, the 2.1 CD will be the biggest seller yet. You may draw your own conclusions from these figures, taking again into account that I'm deliberately understating things to avoid getting clobbered by my boss for releasing confidential sales data. I obviously can't post the subscription figures for magazines because we don't have one. >First of all, a clarification: The "I estimate..." part of this was >NOT written by me. It was written by the person who maintains the Then you have my apologies for this particular aspect of my flame. You must also take a certain level of responsibility for the current tone of this exchange, however. It was not I who started in aggressively making statements like "prove to me that FreeBSD isn't just white noise on the net!", or words to that effect. Did you genuinely expect me to respond to such flagrant flame bait by giving you a cookie and a pat on the head? If you don't want to get flames, then you shouldn't be so quick to give them. I'm not Mother Teresa, and I don't subscribe to the philosophy of turning the other cheek. You flame me or the OS I do my best to represent and I *will* warm up my flame thrower! By all accounts, Linus would appear to subscribe to a similar philosophy, so at least I'm in good company! Jordan