Pardon the widest possible distribution, but I hope that people within Red Hat will take this email as good news about the impact of Fedora Core 6, and as a testament to the size and strength of the Fedora Community.
I'd also like to point out the incredible work of the Fedora Infrastructure team in helping to get us to the point where we know enough to even write this email. Particulary Mike McGrath.
These are the sorts of metrics that we've been dying to get, and while our various attempts at collecting them spawned many threads of the right or wrong way to do it, I think we've stumbled across a good solution.
Today is the 24th day -- about 3.5 weeks -- since FC6 was released. Since release, we've been tracking the number of unique IP addresses that check in via yum for updates.
This metric is much more useful than tracking downloads, because it demonstrates actual *installed instances* of FC6 that are making a connection back to our servers in search of updated software.
A few minutes ago, we crossed over the 300,000 mark.
That's 300,000 different IP addresses that have checked for any updated software in Fedora Core 6.
If you simply divide it out, that averages to about 12,500 per day, or 8.7 every minute. And basically, those are *new installs* of FC6.
That doesn't take into account proxies and firewalls that can make hundreds of servers all look like they are coming from the same IP, so the "real" number is probably even higher than that.
Additionally, fedoraproject.org saw just over 640,000 unique visitors in October, and so far in November has seen just over 300,000 unique visitors.
A more detailed write up is on the fedoraproject.org page: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ZodStats
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