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From: tzs@coho.halcyon.com (Tim Smith)
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: 17 Dec 1995 08:27:07 GMT
Organization: Northwest Nexus, Inc. - Professional Internet Services
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References: <4ajc07$sb7@unix2.glink.net.hk> <4atie8$hsv@agate.berkeley.edu> <4atq47$l46@agate.berkeley.edu> <4att23$mha@agate.berkeley.edu>
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Jordan K. Hubbard <jkh@violet.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>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 think you can do better than that by comparing between {*BSD,Linux) users
and something else whose number of users is known. For example, from a recent
almanac, we see that the following magazines all have circulations of around
a million: Vanity Fair, Car and Driver, Discover, PC Magazine, Consumer's
Digest, Penthouse, Rolling Stone.
So, instead of asking "are there over a million Linux users?", it might be
easier to ask and answer "are there more Linux users than Consumer's Digest
readers?" or "are there more Linux users than PC Magazine readers?". One
could take to asking random people while waiting in line at the supermarket,
"pardon me, but do you read Discover? Do you use Linux?". It should be
possible to get some idea this way.
By the way, number of CDs sold doesn't give a good minimum number. Both
of my FreeBSD CD's are used mostly for reference--because FreeBSD is more
free than Linux, I find it more useful as a source of code I can borrow for
my work, but I don't actually run it. I understand that the latest FreeBSD
and the latest Linux are comparable, but I limit myself to what is available
on CD-ROM, and since Linux CD-ROMs come out much more frequently than FreeBSD
CD-ROMs, for me Linux is always several months or more ahead of FreeBSD in
what it supports.
On the Linux side, I should only count as one Linux user, even though I've
bought 4 different CD-ROM distributions over the last year.
--Tim Smith