On 03/07/2010 11:01 AM, Jon 'maddog' Hall wrote: > o every hardware support contract received a letter > o every software support contract received a letter
There are real advantages to knowing who is using your software. The Fedora people have excellent academic debates about using software update statistics to figure out how many people are using their software. They're pretty confident that their models are right, plus or minus two *million* machines. The error bar in their statistics outpaces the size of their participating community by several orders of magnitude. I'd personally run agents on my machines that gave anonymized software usage reports. We have it for hardware, we're just starting to get there for crashes, but nobody knows how much I use any of my applications, and only very rough guesses about any particular features are possible. There's a general thought that nobody would want to provide this data due to privacy concerns. Funny conversations turn up about product X which gets lots of attention and then it turns out that many/most people are actually using product Y instead and just thought that everybody else was using X because of its vociferous proponents. Well, at least among people participating in the community - who knows what the vast majority is using? -Bill -- Bill McGonigle, Owner BFC Computing, LLC http://bfccomputing.com/ Telephone: +1.603.448.4440 Email, IM, VOIP: b...@bfccomputing.com VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf Social networks: bill_mcgonigle/bill.mcgonigle _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
