On 01/01/2012 07:28 PM, Russ Allbery wrote: > "dE ." <[email protected]> writes: > >> http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-10/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm > >> You might have 60% usage of Debian but for the world it's 0.02%. > > I've never been fond of putting too much weight on this sort of > statistic. > > One of the delightful things about Debian is that the project consists of > a group of people who are working together to create something that, > primarily, we all want to use. Making it usable for everyone else as well > is, of course, a wonderful goal and something that many of us care a lot > about. But I think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that > world-wide adoption on the order of Windows is not a requirement for the > Debian project to be a success. > > Debian is successful every time I boot a system and it's running Debian, > every time Debian solves my problems, every time I can fix something I ran > into because it's Debian and I can help make it better. It's *fun* if I > can get more people to use Debian, and it's important to have an influx of > new blood and new ideas to keep Debian fresh and responsive, but that's > about *keeping* Debian successful, not about *making* Debian successful. > > If we have enough developers to maintain and improve Debian even at the > rate that we're maintaining and improving Debian today, to me that's a > success, and I don't really care whether that number ever moves off of > 0.02%. One of the great things about free software is that we're not a > business: we don't live or die by market share, we aren't going to get > bought out by someone else if we don't become a big enough fish, and we > don't have to grow 10% a year or implode. It would certainly be *nice* to > attract more people and more users and improve even faster, and I > certainly wouldn't want to stand in the way of that, but it's not part of > my metric of success.
This was so nice, I am sure you all liked reading my quote again ;) The very personal/metaphorical successometer of Russ during does not allow any statistics. Anyway, do we have any numbers that are indicative of what we consider successful? What comes to mind are * popcon - the absolute numbers we do not are so much about * popcon.ubuntu.com - the more frequent release cycle variant of us * developer distribution http://www.perrier.eu.org/weblog/2010/08/07#devel-countries-2010 * fresh blood http://wiki.debian.org/DebianMaintainer * the number of blends http://wiki.debian.org/DebianPureBlends And then there is the social side * traveling somewhere meeting other DDs * bringing scientists and techies together No idea how to score anything like that. Well, if I have forgotten about anything ... tell me. Cheers, Steffen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
