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

[Christopher Chan]

On Saturday, November 20, 2010 07:56 AM, Gary wrote:
> 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?
>

I think we can safely assume this to mean installations. Number of 
people that actually use the installation would seriously inflate the 
numbers. If we go by the latter, you have more than 750 users of 
OpenIndiana already from just my installations alone.