From: johnson@trwacs.fp.trw.com (Steve Johnson) Subject: Re: Estimate of # of Linux users? Date: Sat, 1 May 1993 10:57:39 GMT
wirzeniu@cs.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius) writes:
>imp@boulder.parcplace.com (Warner Losh) writes:
>>I've heard numbers like:
>> 5 million Linux users
>> 3.5 Million 386 BSD users
>Based on the estimated readership of c.o.l (in the tens of thousands),
Not everyone has access to or reads c.o.l.
>and a healthy error margin, I'd guess there are at least thousands,
>probably tens of thousands of users. Millions, I doubt it. (If most
Millions? Probably not but then....
>of those 5 million people have ftp'd it in the last 500 days, that
>would mean approximately 10000 downloads per day, or about one every
>nine seconds.)
Who says most folks download from the standard sites? I've personally
made copies of the TAMU distribution (for which I downloaded once) for a
couple of folks, installed it on six machines at work (six more to do in
a few weeks; we're going to use it for training (training doesn't get much
funding) purposes), and made the distribution available on one of those machines
where I know of at least another half dozen folks who have taken home a
copy and none, to my knowledge, has any access to c.o.l. Let's not forget
the multiplier effect. I suspect that most copies of the TAMU distribution at
TAMU were done disk-to-disk not over the net (comments from TAMU?). Slightly
off subject; if someone were able to get a resonably good estimate for the
actual number of Linux users that might help us in getting support from
manufacturers of hardware w.r.t. drivers, etc..
>--
>Lars.Wirzenius@helsinki.fi (finger wirzeniu@klaava.helsinki.fi)
No criticism of anyone (esp. Lars) is intended. Flames to /dev/null.
> MS-DOS, you can't live with it, you can live without it.
Unfortunately my customers seem to think otherwise (but I'm working on
them).
======= Any views expressed are those of myself and not my employer. ========
Steven C. Johnson, WB3IRU / VK2GDS |
TRW | johnson@trwacs.fp.trw.com
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-- ======= Any views expressed are those of myself and not my employer. ======== Steven C. Johnson, WB3IRU / VK2GDS | TRW | johnson@trwacs.fp.trw.com FP1 / 3133 | [129.193.172.90]