thoughts on LWN "how many Fedora users are there"
Rahul Sundaram
sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Fri Oct 13 11:41:32 UTC 2006
Andy Green wrote:
> Anne Wilson wrote:
>> On Thursday 12 October 2006 22:26, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>> http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/203694/dab52f06fe38ff16/
>>>
>> There really is a lot of bs talked, isn't there? I get Fedora for
>> free. I've always assumed that it was perfectly reasonable that
>> Fedora should be able to know that I use their update systems. So
>> they want to actually count? So what? 'Tracking system' implies
>> watching where you go and what you are doing. I don't see any reason
>> to believe that that was the intention.
I think the concerns were overblown.
> There is a rich vein to mine about the way that a funded organization in
> control of a free project (let's not forget, Novell, Ubuntu, Mandriva)
> affects the relationship of the users and in decision making. I don't
> think the tracking jpeg is a good way to come at acquiring stats on the
> userbase, but if RHAT wanted to put it in it hardly seems worth
> objecting to, since the box will shortly have its fingerprints all over
> the mirrorlist and update mirrors anyway, for which we must thank RHAT
> for managing for $0.
Well, a hit counting image was suggested as a way to do things easily
while giving approximate numbers. Firefox users are probably "desktop"
kind of users and are likely to be connected. Here is the proposed page FYI
https://quaid.108.redhat.com/nonav/fedora/homepage/index-en_US.html
I suggested a title change to "Counting Desktop Users" because thats
what was attempted. Anyway, this plan has been dropped in favor of just
analyzing the mirror hits.
>
> I think the guy that proposed the mirrorlist fetch tracking was on to
> the right way for sure. Even better would be a programme to process
> mirror logs to get anaonymized stats, done at the mirror site. I know
> they are independently managed and using a wide set of platforms, but
> you wouldn't have to capture all of them to get a statistically useful
> window into how many boxes are installed, and on regular or irregular
> updates, with nothing on the clientside. It would be quite interesting
> to look at security update uptake over time as well.
We probably dont have to coordinate all these before FC6 release but I
believe some of the mirrors would be willing to provide access logs to
calliberate metrics.
Rahul
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