Canonical Estimates Ubuntu Users Top One Billion
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One of the tough things about free and open source software is figuring out how much of it is out there. Ubuntu has been shooting for 200 million "knowing" users but estimates that total users, willing or not, might number above the one billion mark.
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users? So am I a user if I use a website that's based on Ubuntu - sounds like a numbers game to me.
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@Dashrender said:
users? So am I a user if I use a website that's based on Ubuntu - sounds like a numbers game to me.
That's a tough one. Likely you are. Since we are talking via Ubuntu right now, we are kind of users, right? And I'm writing from an Ubuntu-based workstation, so I'm definitely a user (Mint is an Ubuntu product.)
If you authenticate to a Windows Server for AD, are you an AD user? What makes someone a user or something? Linux is not primarily a desktop, it is primarily a server. What makes someone the "user" of a server? Is it that you use services from it? If so, you are definitely an Ubuntu user. Ubuntu powers a huge percentage of everything that you personally use every day from banking to media to websites, etc.
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@Dashrender said:
sounds like a numbers game to me.
The entire concept of "counting users" or "install base" is a numbers game. If you are trying to compare Windows 10 installs to Mac OSX installs it kind of makes sense, but even there only a little. How many times do you count a single user with many installs of an OS? How do you can't a user who has both? Do you count your tablet? What about your smart watch? What about your smart television? Where do you draw the lines?
Because every product is sold and licensed differently how you think of "users" changes.
Now apply that to servers and appliances. How many users do you have on a NAS, SAN, file server, DNS server, etc.? When people talk Windows install base, they skew the numbers to look at desktops. But that is super misleading as the desktops, while tangible, are a tiny amount of our critical interactions.
We work in IT, we know that servers are generally far more critical than desktops, right? It's where the data lives, it's where much of the processing happens, it's where the applications are.
If you use Netflix, you call yourself a Netflix user, right? That's common parlance. If Netflix runs on Ubuntu (I don't think that it does, I think it runs on Amazon Linux) then wouldn't that make Netflix users very much Ubuntu users if Ubuntu is the main platform that they are using for much of what they do?
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I don't have a problem with a numbers game - but when I see things like this I say - em - who cares? A billion users? so what? Now you tell me there are a billion active installs? Or that a billion people have it installed on a device they use physically, now I start to care (but only if those are important numbers to whatever I'm trying to figure out).
But the fact that there are 1 billion plus users of Ubuntu, again - who cares?
