Re: Modifying GNOME-About to count users



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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