Firefox splash page tracker

[Max Spevack]

On Sat, 30 Sep 2006, Karsten Wade wrote:

> Dimitris, thanks for your well written response.  I tend to agree with 
> your analysis.  The intentions of getting a rough count of desktop users 
> are obviously the best, but the timing is too short to work out all the 
> ramifications (social, technological, etc.).  In American football, this 
> is where we punt, meaning to kick the idea to the next release.
>
> If we had just a bit more time, we could have a button to click to get 
> us some rough numbers, but timing is just too close.

Here's the thing:

We have no useful metris about Fedora *at all*.  Just some bittorrent 
download numbers, which are not very complete.

We have no clue about desktop usage.  We have no clue about server usage. 
We have no clue about fc5, fc4, fc6, etc. usage.

We basically don't know *anything*.  And how on earth can we effectively 
make a case for resources, money, engineers, etc. if we don't have any way 
to *prove* the manner in which people are using our software.

It would be wonderful to do this "right" for FC7.  But it would be a HUGE 
mistake to allow another 6 months to go buy with no metrics because we're 
afraid of having some people feel like they're being tracked.

Doing it secretly is not an option -- that's the sort of thing that will 
get people up in arms.

Firstboot -- a great idea.
A survey -- a great idea.

A simple URL that lets us know there is a desktop user somewhere out the 
on the internets?  A decent idea that we can *just make happen*.  And if 
people want to flame it, they can flame me directly and I'll forward this 
email to fedora-announce-list.

I honestly don't understand what the big deal is.  It's no more or less 
information than you give out *every time* you visit *any website*.

I'm tired of being embarassed when people ask me things like "so, how many 
users ya got?" and I can't answer.

--Max

-- 
Max Spevack
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