Well put Russ!!! Relative percentage is not that important as long as absolute number is positive, which means that fun goes on and our efforts are of benefit ;)
And depending on the audience (field of endeavor, habbits etc) statistics might vary [e.g. 1] ;-) [1] http://neuro.debian.net/blog/2011/2011-06-27_software_survey.html Happy new year On Sun, 01 Jan 2012, Russ Allbery wrote: > > http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-10/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm > > You might have 60% usage of Debian but for the world it's 0.02%. > I've never been fond of putting too much weight on this sort of > statistic. > One of the delightful things about Debian is that the project consists of > a group of people who are working together to create something that, > primarily, we all want to use. Making it usable for everyone else as well > is, of course, a wonderful goal and something that many of us care a lot > about. But I think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that > world-wide adoption on the order of Windows is not a requirement for the > Debian project to be a success. > Debian is successful every time I boot a system and it's running Debian, > every time Debian solves my problems, every time I can fix something I ran > into because it's Debian and I can help make it better. It's *fun* if I > can get more people to use Debian, and it's important to have an influx of > new blood and new ideas to keep Debian fresh and responsive, but that's > about *keeping* Debian successful, not about *making* Debian successful. > If we have enough developers to maintain and improve Debian even at the > rate that we're maintaining and improving Debian today, to me that's a > success, and I don't really care whether that number ever moves off of > 0.02%. One of the great things about free software is that we're not a > business: we don't live or die by market share, we aren't going to get > bought out by someone else if we don't become a big enough fish, and we > don't have to grow 10% a year or implode. It would certainly be *nice* to > attract more people and more users and improve even faster, and I > certainly wouldn't want to stand in the way of that, but it's not part of > my metric of success. -- =------------------------------------------------------------------= Keep in touch www.onerussian.com Yaroslav Halchenko www.ohloh.net/accounts/yarikoptic -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120101184036.gb16...@onerussian.com
