Hi, On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 06:07:50 -0800 Grant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Number of users is largely irrelevant, it's not as if Gentoo needs a > > number of "customers" to survive, it is a non-profit organisation > > producing free products. > > That's exactly the argument here, and the point of creating the 3-way > comparison I suggested. I'm trying to determine if Gentoo does "need > a number of customers to survive", to thrive, or not at all. If you > are all correct, an increased user base would not benefit Gentoo, but > there is a possibility that it would and has. That's what I'm trying > to determine. But that's not possible to determine, given the accessible data. I really start getting annoyed by this thread. It surely *is* an interesting question what impact different user/developer/bugreporter/ML-helper have on the distro. But it is important that especially the questions *you* are asking are of merely sociological nature. I doubt you can prove anything reliably except maybe that Gentoo is very likely to cease to exists if there are *no* (read: zero) users left. All the graphs you can make up with those ratios will always still miss important points. - Given that gentoo is more of a meta-distribution, it is highly dependent on upstream. - The aforementioned (by others) grey user base (local user groups not using central Gentoo infrastructure) is high. - You won't be able to do clear allocations on who's a dev and who's a user and who's a bugreporter without intersections. - You'll never be able to determine users' reasons for joining/leaving gentoo, coincidence with developer-ratios or bug statistics are likely to be flawed. For the questions you're posing here, you really need to take a sociological approach and do carefully crafted interviews with a certain number of users, devs, bug reporters and so on. Purely quantitative relations are doomed to be just marketing-blabla, and even politics in worser cases. -hwh (happy Gentoo user & bugreporter w/ privately used mirrors and a Linux developer) -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
