Canonical Begins Tracking Ubuntu Installations

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canonical Begins Tracking Ubuntu Installations

Just uploaded to the Ubuntu Lucid repository for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (and we imagine it will appear shortly in Maverick too for Ubuntu 10.10) is a new package called canonical-census, which marks its initial release. Curious about what this package provides, we did some digging and found it's for tracking Ubuntu installations by sending an "I am alive" ping to Canonical on a daily basis...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODQ5MA

[curaga]

Is this the mark of the "year of the linux desktop"?
When OEM installs of linux start to have things you remove as the first thing you do... *cough added value cough bloatware cough*

[makzu]

And why exactly can't they get this information from the number of systems hitting the repositories for updates every x amount of time?

Either way, I'll probably leave this installed (after taking a peek at the source to verify that's the only information being sent). If Canonical can have a nice big number of installed systems to point to, it may convince a few more hardware and software vendors to take Linux seriously.

[ethana2]

Awesome, but fixing chrome, epiphany, and midori useragents would make more sense...

We have two Ubuntu Dells in my family, both reinstalled. Dell's version is always so OLD, who would keep it?

[KAMiKAZOW]

And why exactly can't they get this information from the number of systems hitting the repositories for updates every x amount of time?

They could, but then the numbers would easily be comparable and Canonical could no longer act as if Ubuntu was the largest distribution around.
Only once (IIRC roughly a year ago) Canonical revealed through that method that Ubuntu has 8 million installations which is only a third of Fedora.

[ethana2]

They could, but then the numbers would easily be comparable and Canonical could no longer act as if Ubuntu was the largest distribution around.
Only once (IIRC roughly a year ago) Canonical revealed through that method that Ubuntu has 8 million installations which is only a third of Fedora.

AHAHHAHHHAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAAHAAAAAAAHAAAAHAAAAHAHA

Have you ever even SEEN the web stats? Ubuntu/stock Firefox is 51% of desktop linux, confirmed. Fedora is about three percent. Your entire platform is a rounding error, check statowl.com for yourself.

[Alejandro Nova]

I really want this for Fedora. If any Fedora dev is out there, please, make this happen .

It's kinda ironic I am so hesitant to give out my info to proprietary software companies, but, when all is about freedom, I'm more than happy to do so. I have my Smolt monthly-phoning-home enabled, by the way.

[Delgarde]

And why exactly can't they get this information from the number of systems hitting the repositories for updates every x amount of time?

If the goal is specifically to track OEM installations, they need to be able to distinguish them from the larger number of self-installations. While they *could* modify the update mechanism to pass that info, they probably judged that people would make an almighty fuss if they snuck "spyware" into the update mechanism where it couldn't easily be removed, and that a standalone package would be more acceptable.

[movieman]

And why exactly can't they get this information from the number of systems hitting the repositories for updates every x amount of time?

To give a simple example, I have four Ubuntu systems at home and they all get their updates from a local apt-cache on my MythTV backend, so there's only one system out of those four connecting to their servers.

[3vi1]

They could, but then the numbers would easily be comparable and Canonical could no longer act as if Ubuntu was the largest distribution around.
Only once (IIRC roughly a year ago) Canonical revealed through that method that Ubuntu has 8 million installations which is only a third of Fedora.

Yeah.. they could, if they wanted the numbers to be totally inaccurate. Apt-p2p: learn it, love it, live it - if you have more than two Ubuntu machines on your LAN.