thoughts on LWN "how many Fedora users are there"

[Rahul Sundaram]

Andy Green wrote:
> Anne Wilson wrote:
>> On Thursday 12 October 2006 22:26, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>> http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/203694/dab52f06fe38ff16/
>>>
>> There really is a lot of bs talked, isn't there?  I get Fedora for 
>> free.  I've always assumed that it was perfectly reasonable that 
>> Fedora should be able to know that I use their update systems.  So 
>> they want to actually count?  So what?  'Tracking system' implies 
>> watching where you go and what you are doing.  I don't see any reason 
>> to believe that that was the intention.

I think the concerns were overblown.


> There is a rich vein to mine about the way that a funded organization in 
> control of a free project (let's not forget, Novell, Ubuntu, Mandriva) 
> affects the relationship of the users and in decision making.  I don't 
> think the tracking jpeg is a good way to come at acquiring stats on the 
> userbase, but if RHAT wanted to put it in it hardly seems worth 
> objecting to, since the box will shortly have its fingerprints all over 
> the mirrorlist and update mirrors anyway, for which we must thank RHAT 
> for managing for $0.

Well, a hit counting image was suggested as a way to do things easily 
while giving approximate numbers. Firefox users are probably "desktop" 
kind of users and are likely to be connected. Here is the proposed page FYI

https://quaid.108.redhat.com/nonav/fedora/homepage/index-en_US.html

I suggested a title change to "Counting Desktop Users" because thats 
what was attempted.  Anyway, this plan has been dropped in favor of just 
analyzing the mirror hits.

> 
> I think the guy that proposed the mirrorlist fetch tracking was on to 
> the right way for sure.  Even better would be a programme to process 
> mirror logs to get anaonymized stats, done at the mirror site.  I know 
> they are independently managed and using a wide set of platforms, but 
> you wouldn't have to capture all of them to get a statistically useful 
> window into how many boxes are installed, and on regular or irregular 
> updates, with nothing on the clientside.  It would be quite interesting 
> to look at security update uptake over time as well.

We probably dont have to coordinate all these before FC6 release but I 
believe some of the mirrors would be willing to provide access logs to 
calliberate metrics.

Rahul