[OpenIndiana-discuss] [oi-dev] [illumos-Developer] OpenIndiana and illumos, part 2

[Gary]

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010, Jose-Marcio Martins da Cruz on the OI dev list wrote:

> The hard point is that the number of current solaris users is far below the
> number of linux users.

I'm replying to this thread here instead of on the developer lest
someone issue me a netiquette citation for being off topic. How do you
quantify something like that? Even if you have some industry confirmed
sales numbers comparable to IDC tracking desktop PC and notebook
sales, how do you figure out just how many users a server has
regardless of its operating system? Does a web server have a half
dozen users because there are two sysadmins, two content providers,
and two developers? Or does it have 10 million unique visitors every
day and therefore have ten million and six users? Whenever I see this
comment it boggles my mind -- especially when in the context of Unix
systems regardless of flavor. For example, the commercial OSes that
have sold licenses based on 10 users or unlimited users. Ten users of
what? Shell accounts? Ten entries in the password file? What does that
mean and how can you claim that one OS has more "users" than any
another?

-Gary