Fedora user base (was: Can I know which fedora is stable?)

[Wolfgang S. Rupprecht]

Gordon Messmer <yinyang at eburg.com> writes:
> http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/interviews-28/interview-with-greg-dekoenigsberg-red-hat-community-architect-725426/
>
>   Interview with Greg Dekoenigsberg - Red Hat Community Architect
>
> * What do you think is the biggest misconception about Fedora? *
>
> That it's just a beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is most assuredly 
> not. There are over ten million users of Fedora worldwide. If Fedora 
> were "just a beta", I can't imagine that so many people would use it, 
> and contribute so proudly to it.

Ok.  Maybe I shouldn't really ask this, but I think honesty is important
even if it is a bit unpleasant.  How big is the Fedora user base and
how was that measured?

It sure looks like the Fedora user base is closer to 200k from reading
between the lines on the Smolt statistics page at:

        http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/static/stats/stats.html

While a 2.1 Meg installs is quoted, that counts each clean Fedora
re-install separately.  The actual hosts that checked in in the last 3
months is only 200k, and even that probably over-counts the people that
have several fedora versions installed and switch between them.

It would be interesting to see the fedora.pools.ntp.org numbers.  That
would count the hosts that don't submit smolt statistics, but probably
undercount folks like myself that have a few systems behind one NAT-ed 
address.

-wolfgang