Popularity
In September 2005, the BSD Certification Group, after advertising on a number of mailing lists, surveyed 4,330 BSD users, 3,958 of whom took the survey in English, to assess the relative popularity of the various BSD operating systems. About 77% of respondents used FreeBSD, 33% used OpenBSD, 16% used NetBSD, 2.6% used Dragonfly, and 6.6% used other (potentially non-BSD) systems. Other languages offered were Brazilian and European Portuguese, German, Italian, and Polish. Note that there was no control group or pre-screening of the survey takers. Those who checked "Other" were asked to specify that operating system.
Because survey takers were permitted to select more than one answer, the percentages shown in the graph, which are out of the number survey of participants, add up to greater than 100%. If a survey taker filled in more than one choice for "other", this is still only counted as one vote for other on this chart.
Another attempt to profile worldwide BSD usage is the *BSDstats Project, whose primary goal is to demonstrate to hardware vendors the penetration of BSD and viability of hardware drivers for the operating system. The project collects data monthly from any BSD system administrators willing to participate, and currently records the BSD market share of participating FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, PC-BSD, and MirBSD systems.
The DistroWatch website, well known in the Linux community and often used as a rough guide to free operating system popularity, publishes page hits for each of the Linux distributions and other operating systems it covers. As of June 2011, using a data span of the last six months it placed FreeBSD in 15th place with 484 hits per day; PC-BSD in 24th place with 346 hits per day; GhostBSD in 53rd place with 171 hits, OpenBSD in 58th place with 164 hits per day; DragonFly in 62nd place with 142 hits per day; and NetBSD in 100th place with 94 hits per day.
Read more about this topic: Comparison Of BSD Operating Systems
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
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—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
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—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The popularity of that baby-faced boy, who possessed not even the elements of a good actor, was a hallucination in the public mind, and a disgrace to our theatrical history.”
—Thomas Campbell (1777–1844)