BSDstats: New High Water Mark: 25 000+ Hosts Reporting In

[Tim Clewlow]

> [BCCed others]
>
> On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 3:12 PM, Don Witt <witt at cylogistics.com>
> wrote:
>> This is very cool.  What is up with NetBSD and OpenBSD.  Are these
>> numbers
>> accurate?
>
> These numbers represent the number of people that have installed a
> program to report usage, and are almost completely uncorrelated with
> actual usage rates.
>
> If you want to get better numbers you could try to survey all web
> servers on the internet, identify the host operating systems by
> server
> responses, tcp/ip timing characteristics, or other heuristics.  You
> could alternatively mine google analytics  / webserver log data for
> large websites if you want client numbers, or countless other data
> sources that would give you far more data than this self reporting
> mechanism, and with a much better sample than the very biased
> mechanism used for these numbers.
>

Or count the number of systems that call home, ie count the number
of different IP addresses that talk to the *BSD servers to install
or update themselves.

Tim.