Linked by Rahul on Fri 7th Nov 2008 16:17 UTC
Smolt is a opt-in hardware profiler developed by Fedora Project and now adopted by OpenSUSE and in consideration by Ubuntu as well. While originally developed for understanding commonly used hardware, InternetNews looks at the potential for Smolt to be a tool to count Linux users.
"Smolt could also potentially be a tool for counting the total number of users for a given platform, though that's not its ideal use case. The Linux Foundation's Ts'o noted that Smolt probably wound not be that great for counting Linux users as a whole.
Fedora's Frields agreed, noting that Smolt is probably not as good for counting users as it is for counting proportional use of hardware across the user base.
'We prefer to count users with other methods, which we document on our wiki openly and transparently,' Frields said."
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Member since:
2006-10-13
Because linux isn't a company,per se, it is nearly impossible to know how many users there are. It may not be important to you, but the number of people using a product allows companies to market to linux users, who won't port their products blindly. I don't know about you, but i would love Blizzard, for example, to do a population survey of linux users. I want my Diablo 3!