Firefox splash page tracker

[Sam Folk-Williams]

On Tue, 2006-10-03 at 14:04 -0400, Max Spevack wrote:

> 
> 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.
> 

I guess my question is, how could this have happened? How could nothing
have been gathered in all this time? Also, why did this just now become
an urgent thing?

Given that the answers to those questions wont help with the present
problem...

What about getting things like number of people registered with the
wiki/on the mailing lists/registered to community sites like fedora
forum/attending fedora conferences, etc?

> 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.
> 
Again -- why hasn't this been raised sooner?

> 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.
> 
Right so this should be on track for FC7 - any time really.

> 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 don't personally think it's a big deal. I think my resistance is
mostly speculation about how people *might* react, which is nothing
anything should be based on. 

But, can you really count on this data for anything useful? I mean, I
think a lot of people install several distributions just to check them
out when they are first released, for example, but may not have any
intention of actually /using/ it long term. Does that count as a user?

> I'm tired of being embarassed when people ask me things like "so, how many 
> users ya got?" and I can't answer.
> 
I agree - it's silly that we can't answer that question.

Why don't we start to prepare some kind of survey of people who are
registered at various fedora-related sites now? I don't know that it has
to correspond with a release.

On the other hand, if you really think this idea will give you data you
can trust and urgently need, it might well be worth it to go ahead. I
just personally think this feels a bit cobbled together.

Just a couple cents here for discussion. 
> --Max
> 
> -- 
> Max Spevack
> + http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MaxSpevack
> + gpg key -- http://spevack.org/max.asc
> + fingerprint -- CD52 5E72 369B B00D 9E9A 773E 2FDB CB46 5A17 CF21
> 
-- 
Sam Folk-Williams, RHCE
Global Support Services