[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
“If you sell products, measuring sales in terms of dollars
during some reporting cycle–like a quarterly or annual
period–makes perfect sense. It’s dollars you’re interested in, so
dollars you measure. That’s not true, however, for the open-source
community. If you give away the product, then usage is the only
measure that counts.“Unfortunately, no one provides a widely accepted measure of
open-source installations or usage. As a result, the measures that
do exist consistently underestimate the actual install rate.“Consider, for example, the impact of IDC’s recently released
comparisons of its own server and desktop shipping statistics for
2002 and 2001…”