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Subject[OFFTOPIC] distribution of distributions
From
Date
This is an old mail I came across while cleaning out my mail box.  I
suspect that someone out there cares.

-----------

I was attempting to figure out the relative sizes of the various operating
systems and/or distributions out there so I spent a while wandering through
resources on the net. In particluar, I did a series of queries on Deja News
to see who talks about what. I just typed in keywords and searched both
their recent and past news posting archives (for anyone who doesn't know,
Deja News is a company which archives all news postings [maybe not adult,
I don't know for sure] and indexes them in such a way that you can quickly
look up topics).

This is hardly scientific and meaningful if your goal is to know how many
seats there are out there. On the other hand, it's very scientific if
your goal is to know how many people are asking questions in net news
about a particular topic. What conclusions you draw from that is up
to you.

Recent news articles about specific Linux distributions:

RedHat 20000 44%
Debian 12000 26%
Suse 7000 15%
Slackware 5000 11%
Caldera 2000 4%

All news articles back through 1995 about specific Linux distributions:

RedHat 510000 43%
Debian 320000 27%
Suse 160000 13%
Slackware 140000 12%
Caldera 64000 5%

Recent news articles about the following operating systems:

Linux 128000 59%
FreeBSD 31000 14%
Solaris 17000 8%
Windows98 7500 3%
AIX 6000 3%
SCO 5500 2%
HPUX 5000 2%
NetBSD 4000 2%
IRIX 4000 2%
BEOS 3400 2%
WindowsNT 2000 1%
OpenBSD 1500 1%
MacOS 1200 1%
BSDI 900 0%

All news articles back through 1995 about the following operating systems:

Linux 3200000 53%
FreeBSD 630000 11%
Solaris 440000 7%
WindowsNT 410000 7%
MacOS 250000 4%
Windows98 210000 4%
AIX 180000 3%
SCO 150000 2%
HP-UX 120000 2%
IRIX 110000 2%
BEOS 110000 2%
NetBSD 96000 2%
OpenBSD 37000 1%
BSDI 24000 1%

What does this mean? Just that this is the distribution of news postings
made by people about these topics. Does it correlate to distribution
of seats? There's no way to know for sure but I'll bet there is some
correlation if we consider only the Unix seats. We know that there are
more Microsoft seats unless Windows is nothing more than a big marketing
campaign. Still, it is surprising how little discussion there is about
Windows. Perhaps that is because people use a different keyword to describe
windows and I didn't find that or perhpas it is because Windows as an operating
system topic is uninteresting. Or maybe something else, who knows?

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