Re: [Fsfe-uk] Data on UK Linux usage

[Simon Waters]

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On Thursday 20 November 2003 08:24, Alex Hudson wrote:
> 
> I don't think there is any way of getting a reasonable number of OS
> deployments, but then, that's not the case for any OS - even Microsoft
> are unaware of how many people use Windows in this country (since that
> probably gets shared as much if not more than GNU/Linux...). 

If the interest is desktop market share not absolute numbers, you could pick 
any number of mailing lists and pull out the mailer tags in the headers. Mail 
client is mostly a good indicator of OS, certainly you can use it to validate 
the web browser statistics.

Of course both lists will be biased by the areas of interest of the mailing 
list. I bet Bugtraq has a broader mixture of clients, than the average Yahoo 
group on say health issues. Mail client is less biased by functionality of 
the website.... the number of people running Windows only "websites" who say, 
"well our logs show 99.x% of users use IE", life is too short to even talk to 
such people.

I agree there is a lot of Linux out there, not on the Desktop. Firewalls, 
webservers, mail servers, file servers, wireless access points etc etc. But 
lets face there isn't a monopoly problem in embedded operating systems (YET).

 
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