Stand up and be counted - BSDStats Project

[backyard1454-bsd at yahoo.com]

--- Boris Samorodov <bsam at ipt.ru> wrote:

> Hi Marc,
> 
> 
> On Thu, 3 Aug 2006 18:30:08 -0300 (ADT) you wrote:
> 
> > Okay, there has been alot of discussion on this in
> the other thread,
> > some of it tangent'd to the original, so, I'm
> starting off a new
> > thread as a sort of summary ...
> 
> Great idea, but should be introduced with care...
> 
> > I've been doing some thinking on it this
> afternoon, and think I've
> > figured out about the simpliest way of doing it
> ... it still doesn't
> > deal with "fakers" and such, but, IMHO, I don't
> think that that is a
> > *huge* problem that needs to be addressed ... some
> might do it for a
> > lark, but, overall, it just sounds like something
> that is "more worth
> > then its worth", so over time, it should
> eventually balance out ...
> 
> ...taking into consideration *why* do we want to do
> the stats. *If*
> we plan (and this is one of the goals of the
> project) to have those
> stats as a serious argument for a Big Business then
> we *must* prove
> that those numbers are not faked. Or even more
> strict: that those
> numbers can't (or even very, no VERY hard to) be
> faked.
> 
> It's useless (as a serious argument) if it can be
> faked: imagine that
> a virus (warm or else) is written to fake it.
> 
> [Can't comment on the rest right now, thus skipped]
> 
> 
> WBR
> -- 
> Boris Samorodov (bsam)
> Research Engineer, http://www.ipt.ru Telephone &
> Internet SP
> FreeBSD committer, http://www.FreeBSD.org The Power
> To Serve
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> 
Personally I don't think this stuff should be tracked
in any centralized fashion. I don't particullarly like
when our freedom to choose to do something is tracked
or monitored; because it is no longer a freedom. Maybe
that is just paranoia speaking.

I think a much more productive goal is to get all the
users that have unsupported hardware to write into the
vendor that created it and ask them why they don't
support a spawn of the OS that allowed what we call
the internet to exist. Put this message on
FreeBSD.org, get people in this list to do it, get on
a soap box and scream it. I think giving them numbers
of systems will just be ignored. But getting 1000
emails a day in multiple languages from around the
world will get them thinking maybe its worth at least
releasing the specs just to shut these people up.

I know I would get sick of it, and would have to
especially if I were a bossman. Why do I want to pay
poeple to deal with the same questions every single
day when they aren't asking me to necessarily program
a driver for them. All they want is the specs so they
can do it themselves. Code is proprietary in todays
world unfortunatley, but knowing what registers and
what values go into them to make a RAID card work
shouldn't be. But alas maybe big brother thinks it is,
I still remember getting my commodore 64 (I was in
hghschool, it was already 15years old then...) and
having the full schematic of how to build the thing in
the instructions.

What has this world come too. Lets piss off these
vendors instead of driving ourselves nutz trying to
collect usage data, thats what spammers are for...

my too cents

-brian