Dr. Dobbs and Theo de Raadt

Dr. Dobb's Journal has an interview with Theo de Raadt of the OpenBSD project, discussing the future of OpenBSD, where they are now, driver development, the teams that work on OpenBSD, and how OpenBSD is supported. An interesting read describing the fearless leader of the "Secure By Default" BSD.

Re:A group of BSD machines on the counter.

[Baki]

That would not be fair.

For example, I use w2k usually for web browsing, but for most other things I use FreeBSD (and if I use netscape on FreeBSD, it is the Linux version that also identifies itself as such).

It is not possible to make accurate usage statistics in general, and I don't care either. Whether there are 200 or 20.000.000 million users of my favourite OS, as long as it does what I want I'm happy.

Software developers just should (occasionally) port their software to various OSses (if you've done one UNIX port, you've almost done them all) and check from sales/downloads if it is worthwhile for them to maintain the port.

Re:A group of BSD machines on the counter.

[mr]

Actually, because that is not part of the core business of Yahoo!, that could happen.

And because it is not part of Yahoo!'s core business, gahtering and processing this data would not be paid by Yahoo! either.

I have no idea as to whom you'd need to approach to get such information. Perhaps enough concerned admins could get together and insert output from their logs into a central database, who's sole goal it is to try and figure out this question of "who has the bigger OS"? Looking at tne 'results' of redhatisntolinux.org, the large number of slackware users show how results of 'concerned' sysadmins could cook the books.

Re:A group of BSD machines on the counter.

[Tuzanor]

What we need to do is get Yahoo (or some other large portal) to release thier statistics on what OSes are connecting to thier site. That would be invaluable in determining how many users of any OS there are.

Re:A group of BSD machines on the counter.

[xA40D]

Ahh, but the results would be skewed.

My browser tells the world I'm running Linux 2.2.12. Whereas I'm actually running FreeBSD 4.2.

Size of development groups

[bugg]

TdR: I think there's a constant overestimation of how big the Linux development community actually is. I don't think they have thousands of developers working on the hard problems, just on the simple problems and the GUI things. But in the actual operating system, I would be surprised if they have more than 200 people, the kernel, the libraries, the basic utilities. On the other hand, we have about 40 persons who work on just those parts all the time.

It's interesting to see how there's a lot of speculation aroud Linux, with not a lot of basis in fact. For instance, could anyone tell me how many people actively contribute to the parts that Mr. DeRaadt mentioned? His guess is as good as any.

More interesting are the fairly outlandish estimations. Look at the Linux Counter [li.org] 162,506 users registered, and a guess of sixteen million Linux users total. Where are they all hiding? Only 1% have registered? What makes you say that?

It's the same in a lot of the open source world; speculation gets you nowhere. Let's look at what we can quantitvely measure, such as downloads and registered users, and end the guessing games.

Numbers of developers are meaningless: all that matters is the total quality of the development process.

Nice article

[pope nihil]

Maybe this will dispel a few of the myths about Theo and the OpenBSD project. It's nice to see a pleasant view of OpenBSD and even BSD in general in the media. Doesn't seem to happen often enough.

A group of BSD machines on the counter.

[mr]

Yes, there is alot of 'speculation' about the OpenSource market. And some facts would be nice. The closest thing to a 'fact' might be the Gardner group or similar such tracking firm's numbers.

Alas, the 'counter project' doesn't track the version of linux used. www.redhatisnotlinux.org did track the version. And, a grep -i bsd| wc -l shows 135 BSD users....with slackware having higher numbers of users VS RedHat. How many people here think there are more slackware users than redhat?

Somewhere out in cyberspace is a page that tracks the total number of linux distros, and a troll who claims netcraft has OS numbers for 'paying customers'. And, I'm usre someone has a %age breakdown for each linux distro. Yet, no URL's to ANY of this information.

I guesstimate that between 0.2% and 5% of all Linux users have registered with the Linux Counter. So the total number of Linux users is probablybetween 3,250,160 and 81,254,000 people.

Yea, 81 MILLION users. Right.

How about 'linux is #2 os' statement of the other day. What, the DOCUMENTED sales numbers of Apple are meaningless? Where did these numbers come from? If you believe the linux counter people, its no WONDER they are #2, with 81 million users.

So, other than Linux counter...does anyone have any meaningful numbers or URL's to meaningful numbers?