MIP sends us word on an article claiming fault at Mandrake for inept marketing as reason for their lack of market share, but on closer inspection, does it really say Mandrake trails the pack?

Or does it merely say you won't find many fish in a desert?

This issue has been hashed to death over the past decade: How can we count installations of a free operating system? The article above used pre-installs, which is just downright assinine and not worth the pixels it's printed on. Ditto for Units Shipped because, even if that was the only sales channel any given CD could still be used to liberate a dozen or more previously malinstallations. There's just no value to any statistic with a 600% margin of error.

So what's left? Well, fortunately the answer is there under all the pundit journalists noses, and it's been there for years if they would only look:

LinuxCounter Distro Report

distribution	Count	Percent
debian	29661	20.80%
fedora core	1666	1.17%
gentoo	8226	5.77%
mandrake	20129	14.12%
red hat	31431	22.04%
s.u.s.e	15144	10.62%
slackware	16099	11.29%
Others	22487	15.77%

The Linux Counter is a volunteer Linux evangelism project launched 11 years ago with a simple mandate:

there have been many attempts at defining the size of the Linux user base. None of them contained hard data.

Now, in an attempt to establish a lower limit on the number of Linux users, I have put up a MAIL SERVER that does counting.

The Counter now boasts a registration of 145391 machines by 144833 members leading to a figure of eighteen million estimated Linux users -- and here's where you and I come in, you, me and the distros:

a call for participation

Today there are more Linux distributions than ever before, Linux is tucked into more spaces than any of us ever imagined back ten years ago, but we're being lax in letting the world know.

It's time to wear our hearts on our sleeves, and it's so simple to do, there's just no excuse not to support the Linux Counter with your data.

1. First and foremost, to the makers of the distros: Why not fold the Linux Counter scripts right into the distro as an install option. We live in an age of DHCP and /proc will give just about everything you need to feed the counter via the machine-update scripts. So why don't we just do it?
2. For those of you who are discovering GNU and deploying Linux throughout your computing life, all you have to do is grab the simple automatic update script ... sure it's a line in your crontab (or /etc/ppp/ip-up.local for those on dialup) and yes that means fiddling with @Vi@, but it's worth the bother, and you'll never need to do it again.

And why not? Are we still afraid to be known as people who care about our computing freedom? Do we fear disclosing our competitive advantage over our OS-chained colleagues? There's no longer any need to be ashamed of our choice, and as that article demonstrates, there's more reason than ever to stand up and say

I run with GNU, and my GNU is Linux!

We can do this. Let's do it now.