Open Source Blog

Over at Groklaw's news picks section today PJ gives her thoughts on why "fourth quarter downloads" do not necessarily mean support for Novell's Microsoft agreement.

"I think it's most likely folks who want the last "clean" and Microsoft-free SUSE, because they *don't* want it in the future, due to trust issues and ethics issues," she writes.

There is a simpler explanation - those aren't download statistics.

PJ was responding to Dana Blankenhorn's blog post in which he stated that "fourth quarter downloads indicate that many customers are taking those claims seriously" repeating a previous mistake in which he referenced a report by Bob Mims of the Salt Lake Tribune.

"In the past month, Open Suse supplanted Ubuntu as the No. 1 choice, according to the download access-tracking DistroWatch.com Web site. Fedora? It fell to No. 3," wrote Mimms.

But DistroWatch does not track download access, it tracks the average hits per day for each of its own distribution pages.

It would be easy to suggest that Novell is responsible for this misunderstanding (in the current climate I wouldn't be surprised to see Novell blamed for the deaths of JFK and Princess Diana) but that would be wrong.

UPDATE - Or maybe not, see below.

The company has certainly pointed to the DistroWatch figures recently, once in this blog on December 11, and once in this press release on the same day. Neither mentioned downloads.

Maybe Novell spokesperson Kevan Barney told Mims something different, but this looks like a simple misunderstanding that has snowballed thanks to the nature of blogging.

UPDATE - If it was a simple misunderstanding, Novell certainly has not gone out of its way to correct it. In fact, as PJ has pointed out, the company is linking to the story on its own pressroom page, so it's positively benefiting from the error. Maybe that was Ron Hovsepian on the grassy knoll after all.

That's not to say that the popularity of - CORRECTION interest in - openSUSE is not growing, but hits do not equal downloads, and as mentioned recently, downloads do not equal customers.

UPDATE - It also goes to show how important it is to check statistics. Mims, Blankenhorn and PJ are all excellent writers and trusted sources, but mistakes do happen. When blogging it is so easy to just link to something and assume it to be true. I've certainly done it, just as I've started writing a blog without really knowing where I was going with it. You only have to correct/update it later...