Fedora stats offer insight into Linux usage

[Rahul Sundaram]

Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram escribió:
>> Hi,
>>
>>
>> http://www.linux.com/feature/118197
>>
>> Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier talks with Fedora's Max Spevack about some 
>> recently released statistics. "The Fedora Project offered a peek under 
>> its kimono recently with details about Fedora 7 adoption and other 
>> statistics. Fedora 7 has snagged more than 300,000 users since its 
>> release at the end of May. While that sounds pretty good, Fedora Core 
>> 6 managed to attract more than 400,000 in roughly the same amount of 
>> time after its release. We asked Max Spevack, the Fedora project 
>> leader, whether the numbers are telling the full story."
>>
>> Rahul
>>
> Excellent! This shows one more time the Fedora's leadership at taking 
> initiative to not only have an Open Source Software distribution, but 
> also Open Source Information. I wonder a couple of things, though:
> 
> * Will RHEL include such methods to also measure system use? Or is there 
> no need for this as it is "subscription based"?

There is a need for it but that need is fulfilled by registrations in 
RHN. Smolt is in fact derived from RHN client side tools and like Smolt 
RHEL has detailed statistics with more data by the virtue of being 
customers.

> * How are the efforts to convince other distributions to also add to the 
> smolt and others statistics efforts initiated by Fedora?

I am in discussions with Mandriva and SUSE.

> * Do we envision a "global" statistics center where developers, hardware 
> vendors, software vendors, distributors could look at in a future and 
> better target their:
>    * Products.
>    * Development efforts.
>    * Bug tracking systems.
>    * Expected user base for a given product or service.
> 
> This really looks very nice! Go, go Fedora!
> 

Yes. If other distributions agree to adopt Smolt, the potential benefits 
are much larger. See http://rahulsundaram.livejournal.com/11995.html for 
more details.

Rahul