On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 10:47:06AM +0200, Philippe Grosjean wrote: > The main role of this code would be, of course, to warn users that an update > is available. One side effect would be that it should be possible to monitor > access to the link in the centralized web site and to know:
I appreciate that it would be really nice to know the size of the user base: the fact that lots of people are using R would give everybody a warm, fuzzy feeling. On the other hand, some people are getting carried away with this discussion. I would consider the above suggestion a serious violation of my privacy: if I want to make this type of personal data (what software you use is personal data, in the legal sense) public, I can do it, but I don't want any software on my computer which "kindly" does that for me if I did not ask for it. I don't care whether the data would be anonymized -- it is a matter of principle. Note that I am using Debian's popularity-contest package, but that was my choice, not somebody else's. BTW, this package would be able to give some statistics on how widespread R is among Debian users. So before people are coming up with ingenious (and possibly invasive) methods to estimate the user base, I would like somebody to explain why this is relevant. R already has the "critical mass" it needs, given that it is a specialized piece of software. It is always good to have a broader user base, but R is doing fine as it is. In some markets, it is safer to pick a product with a wider user base (think VHS vs Betamax), and sometimes this argument applies to software (eg you should not make your bet on a commercial, closed-source software company with a dwindling user base, because if they go bankrupt, you can expect no updates etc). But free software is entirely different. Knowing that we have more than a couple thousand users and dozens of active developers is good enough for me. Best, Tamas -- Tamás K. Papp E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please try to send only (latin-2) plain text, not HTML or other garbage. ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html