Seven Percent

[Andy Green]

Anne Wilson wrote:

> On Friday 01 September 2006 11:14, Paul Smith wrote:
>> It would be interesting to know how much large are the communities of
>> each distribution. Can the figures be found somewhere?
>>
> Equally interesting would be where the sample was taken from - IOW what target 
> audience is likely to have replied - and how big the sample was.  I suspect 
> that the sampling setup would have a great effect on the results, which is 
> why statistics are rarely useful.

Statistics are often very useful, that's why people keep making them up. 
  Rarely though do they mean what they are spun to mean.

However anecdotally places like Digg are full of viral Ubuntu mindshare 
zombies.  Of course in a larger sense it's all good if it gets the Linux 
word out and reduces the ability to FUD it since people had experience 
of it.  But I can't help feeling some of the newbie growth of Ubuntu is 
partially driven by where we are in the Microsoft product cycle and 
there's some easy come easy go built into it.

Les is clearly right about some folks looking for the stability and 
novelty sweetspot (seems we both use CentOS and Fedora so it is in our 
minds at least), but is that really where all the Ubuntu ravers have 
sprung from?

If you zoom out, Debian and Fedora have about a million times as much 
weight of code in common (KDE is KDE, Gnome is Gnome) as they do at 
odds.  Even rpm and dpkg are doing much the same thing in a different 
format.  So in a real sense if new people are getting turned on to 
Ubuntu it's a much of a win for FOSS as if they get turned on to Fedora.

The more I understand[1] about Fedora and the relationship of Redhat to 
it, the more of a curious creature it is even by standards of a Linux 
distro.  We all benefit from what is really the awesome professionalism 
of the engineering from Redhat, easy to take it for granted since the 
vast bulk of stuff works smoothly.   But to balance it as users we are 
cast somewhat as dependent children, since RHAT have the -- perhaps it 
is inevitable from the structure and funding -- the role of parent.  To 
be fair, we are a thousand times less the dependent children as a 
Microsoft or Apple user, and RHAT have a fairly light hand, we have 
reason to be grateful for it, but still.  I suppose Shuttleworth is 
probably fated to fulfill the same moneybags role and therefore place 
the users under the same bittersweet shadow.

-Andy

[1] I understood a lot more after the recent corporate rpm vitriol

http://lwn.net/Articles/196523
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.advisory-board/348/focus=348
https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/rpm-devel/2006-August/001362.html
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