| Man Bites Dog: Counting Linux In |
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If you sell products, measuring sales in terms of dollars during some reporting cycle -- like a quarterly or annual period -- makes perfect sense. It's dollars you're interested in, so dollars you measure. That's not true, however, for the open-source community. If you give away the product, then usage is the only measure that counts.
Unfortunately, no one provides a widely accepted measure of open-source installations or usage. As a result, the measures that do exist consistently underestimate the actual install rate.
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