Re: Modifying GNOME-About to count users

[Rob Adams <readams readams net>]

If it's off by default we may as well not bother to include it, since it
will be utterly useless in counting measures.  We'd just as well have a
web poll to track market share.

We can avoid accusations of privacy violations through the very
transparency under which we develop everything: The source code for the
client and the server.

The question that remains to answer is: Are the statistics sufficiently
valuable as to be useful?  What do we compare them to to determine
market share?  If its just so we can have a counter on the home page,
probably not worth it.

-Rob

On Wed, 2005-07-06 at 11:30 +1200, John Williams wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 11:21 -0400, Robert Love wrote:
> > On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 14:37 +1200, John Williams wrote:
> > 
> > > Essentially we propose modifying the GNOME About box to include a toggle
> > > that indicate the user's permission to activate a program that would
> > > periodically contact a central GNOME server.   Information that would be
> > > transmitted and recorded has not been decided yet, but the prime
> > > requirement is to record the number of current GNOME users (not
> > > installations) on a (say) monthly basis.
> > 
> > I can see the slashdot article now..
> > 
> Really?  What does it say?
> 
> "GNOME gets off its arse and tries to measure market share in the
> buildup to 10x10"
> 
> or
> 
> "GNOME acts like Evil Empire M$ by embedding secret software the spy on
> users"
> 
> ?
> 
> It is exactly the latter that we want to avoid, by making this toggle
> button off by default (as explained on the wiki page).
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