What I would like to see, or "How many FreeBSD boxen are out there?"

[User Freebsd]

On various lists, including this one, there is talk about how to we make 
hardware vendors sit up and take more notice of us ... alot of the 
negative responses back seem to be 'we are too small of a group', but, of 
couse, nobody out there can really give any even *reasonable* numbers of 
desktops and servers deployed with FreeBSD ...

What I'd love to see is a *project initiated* (or FreeBSD Foundation) 
FreeBSD reporting mechanism similar to:

 		http://www.mreriksson.net/uptimes/myuptimes

Something just for FreeBSD users (well, all *BSD users should be invited) 
... uptime not being the really big thing here, but stuff like version of 
FreeBSD being run, country being run in, maybe have it part dmesg on 
startup and report devices in use, etc ...

Come up with reports like # of hosts using fxp vs em devices, etc ... 
although it may be a bit more difficult, I don't know, but report on 
specific hardware being used ...

Statistics that either Core, or the FreeBSD Foundation, can use to show 
vendors they are talking to about what is currently in use ... but also to 
show developers themselves what device drivers are actually in use, that 
sort of thing ...

Nothing that I'd think would be 'sensitive information', but information 
that would be useful from either a marketing, or support, point of view 
...

And market / promote it ...

Basically, unless I'm mistaken, right now we have *nothing* to base 
numbers on, except maybe the netcraft report(s)? ... but, that only 
includes hosts running web servers ... how many are running firewalls? 
desktops?  mail servers?  etc ...

We need to show vendors we aren't some "hobbiest group", and towards that 
end, producing some sort of up to date #s would really help, I would think 
... show them we are a market worth looking at ...

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email . scrappy at hub.org                              MSN . scrappy at hub.org
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