From: jem@sunSITE.unc.edu (Jonathan Magid) Subject: Re: Estimate of # of Linux users? Date: Sat, 1 May 1993 20:47:29 GMT
In article <C6B54L.DCx@boulder.parcplace.com> imp@boulder.parcplace.com (Warner Losh) writes:
>>Is there a consensus estimate on the number of people currently using Linux?
>
>I've heard numbers like:
> 5 million Linux users
> 3.5 Million 386 BSD users
>
>These numbers were based on ftp connections to various sites
>containing these systems.
these are pretty silly numbers; I am not responsible for them and I doubt
that Ted Tso is either. (unless he picked up some weird bug in Hong Kong. :) )
For number of users, I tend to use the estimate of C.o.l readers: 75000(?).
Also I can check the FTP logs and... one second... well actually it took
about 20 minutes. There were 10,043 different hosts that downloaded Linux
stuff from sunsite during the month of April.(*)
To this, one could add those who ordered Linux from magazines, those who
got it from friends (I have given out SLS disks to a half dozen people, but
I am probably worse than most :) )
In all, I would say around 100,000 users. more or less. within an order of
magniture.
(*) script used: fgrep Linux /usr/adm/xferlog | sort +6 | gawk '{ print $7 } |
uniq | wc -l
jem.