[ 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…”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
LinuxToday is a trusted, contributor-driven news resource supporting all types of Linux users. Our thriving international community engages with us through social media and frequent content contributions aimed at solving problems ranging from personal computing to enterprise-level IT operations. LinuxToday serves as a home for a community that struggles to find comparable information elsewhere on the web.
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