DECnet and other dead technologies (was: Linux for "cloud computing")

[Bill McGonigle]

On 03/07/2010 11:01 AM, Jon 'maddog' Hall wrote:
> o every hardware support contract received a letter
> o every software support contract received a letter

There are real advantages to knowing who is using your software.  The 
Fedora people have excellent academic debates about using software 
update statistics to figure out how many people are using their 
software.  They're pretty confident that their models are right, plus or 
minus two *million* machines.  The error bar in their statistics 
outpaces the size of their participating community by several orders of 
magnitude.

I'd personally run agents on my machines that gave anonymized software 
usage reports.  We have it for hardware, we're just starting to get 
there for crashes, but nobody knows how much I use any of my 
applications, and only very rough guesses about any particular features 
are possible.  There's a general thought that nobody would want to 
provide this data due to privacy concerns.

Funny conversations turn up about product X which gets lots of attention 
and then it turns out that many/most people are actually using product Y 
instead and just thought that everybody else was using X because of its 
vociferous proponents.  Well, at least among people participating in the 
community - who knows what the vast majority is using?

-Bill

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Bill McGonigle, Owner
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