Gotta start somewhere ... how many of us are really out there?

[User Freebsd]

Okay, here is the challenge ... for vendors to 'take notice' of the fact 
that exist as a market, there really needs to be *some* numbers that ppl 
like -core, -advocacy and -marketing can use ... right now, there is 
nothing out there that can be considered either 'half the story', or just 
purely guess work ...

This means that when someone here talks about "don't buy from company A 
because they don't support us", its kind of a meaningless boycott, since, 
as far as they are concerned, they aren't making any money off us, 
therefore, aren't losing any ...

Although I'd eventually like to see something better that includes more 
information (ie. version of FreeBSD being run, AMD vs Intel, etc), even 
just getting #s on the size of the community that we are apart of would be 
good ....

Also, for the data to *mean* anything, it has to be semi-realtime, in that 
it can't just be sent in once, but a ping has to be sent in periodically 
to show that that server *is*, in fact, actually still running FreeBSD ...

Towards that end, as a starter, I would like to encourage everyone out 
there running 1 or more FreeBSD boxes to go to

           http://www.mreriksson.net/uptimes

register all of your hosts, and install /usr/ports/sysutils/uptimec and 
get it running ...

Right now, there are 249 FreeBSD hosts listed ... I can't believe that 
that is *all* of them out there ...

We don't care about the uptime side of things ... all we care about is 
finding out how many FreeBSD hosts are actually being run ... how big are 
we as a market ...

I'm currently trying to come up with something better, but, right now, 
that seems to be the best that is out there ...

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email . scrappy at hub.org                              MSN . scrappy at hub.org
Yahoo . yscrappy               Skype: hub.org        ICQ . 7615664