On Thu, 2006-10-05 at 04:28 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote: Sure. We just need it to be in a unique location hit only by this page; I'll get that done. OK, thx. We are talking to people who wouldn't get that and would worry about multiple hits. People who think a rolling page hit counter has meaning. I thought we were trying for clarity and honesty in the message? Everything I read in the thread so far boils down to, "We need this to justify (more) money, and that is the primary importance over all other considerations at this time." Counting users to make better decisions is obfuscation talk. How does a raw user count make better decisions? You'd need to know some depth about those users to have it influence decisions. Perhaps we can soften the blow better than I did, but if we're being honest, we have to be honest *and* clear. - Karsten -- Karsten Wade, RHCE, 108 Editor ^ Fedora Documentation Project Sr. Developer Relations Mgr. | fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject quaid.108.redhat.com | gpg key: AD0E0C41 ////////////////////////////////// \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

On Wed, 2006-10-04 at 17:03 -0700, Karsten Wade wrote: +1 on this. The tracker word freaked me out. Maybe something like "How many Fedora users are there?" We don't want it to sound like we don't care if the data is wrong. The sentence as is says to me, "We know this is inaccurate and stupid, but hey we're doing it anyway". Maybe just something like, "We are counting the number of unique IP addresses. If you are connecting from home or from your office, you will likely always have the same IP address and therefore won't be counted multiple times. " Or... maybe even better nothing at all. I see both of sides of this one, but ultimately I agree with Rahul's take. I like the idea of linking to a wiki page where things are explained in greater detail for those who care. For those who don't, let's keep the text minimal on this page... -- Sam Folk-Williams, RHCE Global Support Services

Apologies in advance for a very long-winded email. First, let me first offer a personal apology about this whole tracker business. I know that a lot of people here disagree with both the idea of a tracker, and the method that's being used to push it through. The hardworking volunteers on this team are being asked to do something unpalatable, at the last minute, outside of the team's process, without the benefit of real debate. Generally speaking, it's pretty much the opposite of how decisions should be taken in the community. That sucks. As the person who is strongly advocating this solution, it makes me feel like a jackass. Generally speaking, I don't like to feel like a jackass. In almost all cases, "Greg feels like jackass" is usually a strong signal that "Greg is wrong". In this case, though, "Greg feels like a jackass" makes me feel more like "Greg probably went about things the wrong way and needs to explain himself, but Greg is still fighting hard to do the right thing." So let me explain. We've still got some time to discuss "the right thing". It's not much time, but at least I'll feel like I made an honest attempt. I also want to make this very clear: I admire and respect this community and its leadership. I consider many of you to be longstanding friends. I am still at Red Hat because I believe in the importance of the work that we all do together. I hope you all understand that, even if I advocate a position that you strongly disagree with, I do it because I believe that it will benefit Fedora's users and contributors in the long run. 1. WHY ARE METRICS SO IMPORTANT? Really, this question should be asked this way: "are metrics so important that you're ready to risk alienating some users and contributors to get them?" And the answer to that question, from my perspective, is "yes". Why? Because, like it or not, every funding conversation inside of Red Hat's walls begins and ends with metrics. If it isn't measurable, it doesn't exist. Fact. This is especially important in the case of Fedora, because Fedora doesn't make any money directly for Red Hat. We continue to develop Fedora because it serves other purposes. Research and development. Quality Assurance for RHEL. The ethics of continuing to provide free software, which is important to all of us. And, most importantly from my own perspective, *community mindshare*. If we can't quantify Fedora's mindshare in some way, we lose one of the *major* rationales for making the Fedora Project stronger and more independent. Every time a Red Hat executive asks "how many Fedora users are out there?" and we answer "oh, somewhere between 100k and a few million," we make it *that* much more difficult to defend Fedora from bad Red Hat decisions. If a Red Hat executive has to choose between giving resources to RHEL and giving resources to Fedora, and if he's got dollar figures on one side of the ledger and hand-wavy "mindshare" guesses on the other side of the ledger, he's going to choose RHEL. Every single time. I've seen it happen, again and again and again and again. And again. Part of my job as "the community guy" is to fight my ass off to make sure we don't continue to make those mistakes. To win that fight, I need metrics. And the better metrics I have, the better a fight I can put up on Fedora's behalf. So will better metrics suddenly fill the Fedora coffers with gold, and allow us to hire engineers to solve all of Fedora's problems? No. Not hardly. But these metrics *are* a necessary precondition to further funding: of developer conferences, of infrastructure projects, of more hardware, of more engineers. In short: Red Hat asks Fedora to be accountable for delivering value to the company -- value that must be quantified beyond dollars and cents. If we cannot be accountable in this way, we make it difficult to justify further investment. Investment that is, in my opinion, *badly needed* to ensure ever more meaningful community involvement. These are, in the end, political disputes. Karsten has argued to me privately that "the Fedora community shouldn't have to care about Red Hat's political issues." In an ideal world, that would be true. But in the real world, Fedora is *incredibly* dependent upon Red Hat's largesse to be successful. 2. OKAY, FINE, WE TAKE THE POINT ABOUT METRICS -- BUT DON'T THE PROPOSED FIREFOX METRICS SUCK? ARE UNIQUE IP ADDRESSES REALLY THAT USEFUL? Maybe not. There may be better ways, and it's clear to me now that we should have been discussing all of these better ways a long time ago. In my judgment, this solution had three primary benefits that recommended it above all others: a. Dead simple to implement; b. Will gather the most data, since more computer users run web browsers than just about any other application (which is arguably anecdotal); c. Will gather data that may potentially be sliced across several meaningful axes, including language and region. Seth Vidal also points out that we can gather much of the same data from yum, since yum talks to a central server to obtain mirror data. This is another useful approach, and if we'd been having this conversation in public over a long period of time, it would have become evident much earlier. I would argue that this data should be collected *in addition* to the Firefox data, because it will tell us a different story: not necessarily desktop users, users who understand that updates are important, users who have bandwidth to retrieve updates online. Every metric is imperfect. The Firefox metric is the best one I've been able to come up with in this short timeframe. 3. CAN THIS NOT WAIT UNTIL FC7, WHEN WE CAN SOLVE THIS PROBLEM "THE RIGHT WAY"? I don't believe we can. In my opinion, we need *urgently* to start somewhere. It's the difference between building a funding plan now and building it 6-9 months from now. Now, that said, I think that solving this problem *correctly* is vital. Ultimately, I think a new page in firstboot in FC7 is the right solution. But that will require a robust backend, and those are seldom as simple as they seem when you're drawing them up on the whiteboard. 4. WHY IN GOD'S NAME DIDN'T YOU COME TO US WITH ALL OF THIS EARLIER? The honest truth: I never expected this firestorm of controversy. Setting the start page to go to a vendor site is one of the oldest tricks in the browser world; Netscape was using this technique as one of their primary business strategies over ten years ago. We collect exactly *zero* personally identifiable information. It just seems so clearly defensible to me that I never even considered the possibility that reasonable people would object to it. But you are all reasonable people, and many of you object to it. And it's possible that some of our users will object to it as well. I understand that. But I believe it's a risk we need to take. It's a tricky thing, you know? It's clear to me now that we should have been having this conversation weeks ago -- and I believe that many people feel more strongly about the way this solution has been shoved down people's throats than they feel about the proposed solution itself. For that, I deeply and humbly apologize. I screwed up. I'm sorry. Screwups aside, though, we're at a decision point. I've done my best to convince you all the best way I know how. The decision is ultimately in Max's hands; he gets paid to make exactly these kinds of decisions, and he ultimately is held accountable by Red Hat for Fedora's successes and failures. Anyway. If you all feel so strongly that my analysis is *so flawed*, and that the perceptions of this "tracker" have the potential to be *so damaging* to the goals of the project, that we should wait another several months and bet on another solution in FC7... well, then, I'll take your side in the matter, and trust you to help us solve this problem in FC7. When we've really needed you, you've never let us down before. --g ------------------------------------------------------------- Greg DeKoenigsberg || Fedora Project || fedoraproject.org Be an Ambassador || http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors -------------------------------------------------------------

Dimitris Glezos wrote: What would be the best way to do that? Not very related, I have a hunch that the release might be delayed a bit after the t4 release and looking at the number of release blockers. So we still have might have some room for discussion. Rahul