Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Awkward article.

On 10/31/2012 09:19 AM, Florian Monfort wrote:
> Now that's an awkward article, is he right about what he says ?
>
> http://www.robweir.com/blog/2012/10/libreoffices-dubious-claims-part-i-downloads.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+robweir%2Fantic-atom+%28Rob+Weir%3A+An+Antic+Disposition%29
I skimmed the article. My first impression is that the author is 
probably mixing statistics that are not measured or defined the same. 
Thus, direct comparison is at best difficult and possible virtually 
impossible. This is problem is common with FOSS software - how does one 
measure market penetration and use? Distrowatch has a ranking of Linux 
distros on their main page that currently shows Linux Mint in first 
place. What does this ranking mean? Distrowatch cautions people to not 
read to much into their rankings as they are determined by internal page 
hits on each distro's Distrowatch information page and does not 
represent actual verified users.

The author cites statistics from a download site showing AOO is more 
popular than LO but does not address the obvious question of which is 
promoted by the site AOO or LO. I would suspect most users looking for a 
MSO replacement would be happy with either AOO or LO thus the how the 
site promotes each could skew the downloads. Most Linux distros supply 
LO by default thus a Linux user would need to install AOO specifically 
to even use it. This obviously skews usage statistics because I suspect 
most Linux users are satisfied with the distro's default choice not to 
change it. IMHO, if AOO was the default choice I doubt most Linux users 
would change to LO.

My other question is; what is the author's agenda - to bash LO and 
promote AOO or to discuss the difficulties in determine the market 
penetration of any FOSS project. The tone appears to bash LO because he 
did not like statistics from LO. There are numerous problems with 
everyone's statistics because of double counts, installation of 
different suites, etc. that make interpreting them difficult.

IMHO, the only substantive issue is how can one determine market share 
and usage without resorting to using polling from download statistics, 
distro installations, etc.

--
Jay Lozier
jslozier@gmail.com


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