Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2006 14:30:35 -0300 (ADT) From: User Freebsd <freebsd@hub.org> To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: What sort of market does FreeBSD provide ... ? Message-ID: <20060723142832.H1799@ganymede.hub.org>
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On various lists, there is talk about how to we make hardware vendors sit
up and take more notice of us ... alot of the negative responses seem to
be 'we are too small of a group', but, of course, nobody out there can
really give any even *reasonable* numbers of desktops and servers deployed
with FreeBSD ...
What I'd love to see is a *project initiated* (or FreeBSD Foundation) FreeBSD
reporting mechanism similar to:
http://www.mreriksson.net/uptimes/myuptimes
Something just for FreeBSD users (well, all *BSD users should be invited,
as I'd hope stuff like drivers are at least *semi* cross-shareable) ...
uptime not being the really big thing here, but stuff like version of
FreeBSD being run, country being run in, maybe have it parse dmesg on
startup and report devices in use, etc ...
Come up with reports like # of hosts using fxp vs em devices, etc ... although
it may be a bit more difficult, I don't know, but report on specific hardware
being used ...
Statistics that either Core, or the FreeBSD Foundation, can use to show vendors
they are talking to about what is currently in use ... but also to show
developers themselves what device drivers are actually in use, that sort of
thing ...
Nothing that I'd think would be 'sensitive information', but information that
would be useful from either a marketing, or support, point of view ...
And market / promote it ...
Basically, unless I'm mistaken, right now we have *nothing* to base numbers on,
except maybe the netcraft report(s)? ... but, that only includes hosts running
web servers ... how many are running firewalls? desktops? mail servers? etc
...
We need to show vendors we aren't some "hobbiest group", and towards that end,
producing some sort of up to date #s would really help, I would think ... show
them we are a market worth looking at ...
----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email . scrappy@hub.org MSN . scrappy@hub.org
Yahoo . yscrappy Skype: hub.org ICQ . 7615664
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