DECnet and other dead technologies

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> writes:
>
> 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.

Debian-based systems (including Ubuntu) have a package called
"popularity-contest" (sometimes referred-to as "popcon"),
which does exactly what you're describing.

I don't know what's available on Fedora or its relatives.

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."