On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 20:27 +1000, Daniel Pittman wrote: > Jeff Waugh <[email protected]> writes: > > <quote who="Ken Foskey"> > > > >> Hmm discounts all my work. In one company a mere 2,000 employees got > >> to see it. > >> > >> Hey if my software is used by tens of people but the results are seen > >> by millions does that count? Nope I guess not really. > >> > >> I am wandering away depressed that I have squandered my life > >> programming meaningless applications... > > > > Not sure it makes too much sense to review your life's work on > > Daniel's very literal argumentation... :-) > > Colour me bitter, but the standard that Robert set seems a touch > dismissive by placing a bar that almost no software every achieves.
Nearly everything in Ubuntu's default install reaches that degree of usage, more or less. Sure, most of the software in Ubuntu isn't in the default install. Heck, most of the software I've altered or written is almost certainly several orders of magnitude less used than say 'gdm'. Clearly, you get more feedback as you get more users, and anyone with a product used by thousands of users should be happy with that. But "Mainstream" software - which for me is software that has crossed the divide and become broadly available in its chosen market rather than being available only if you know about it and ask the right questions - really does have millions of users. And yes, I know I'm discounting niche software packages like urban waste planning software - for such software the entire market is probably only just big enough to meet 'millions of users', if that. I certainly didn't mean to diminish the contribution we make when we contribute to an open source project that *isn't* already used by the vast masses. It is important to realise that the dynamic of talking to all your users and getting good bug reports changes drastically as the user base scales out. With all of those caveats, I *still* wouldn't call a piece of software that 2000 people use as 'mainstream', particularly in a closed environment like in-house software: You've got at most $EMPLOYEES configurations to deal with, and typically internal IS will be trying to keep that down to a single digit count, as every different configuration adds to the support burden. -Rob
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