Track who installed what ports on what OS and on what

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On May 14, 2007, at 2:28 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> I see! Well, that's two people vehemently opposed so far. :)  
> Interesting.
>
> For comparison, it's far from unprecedented for programs to send  
> statistical information to their developers when they check for  
> updates. The popular text editors BBEdit and TextWrangler from Bare  
> Bones Software do this, for example, as does the venerable dock  
> utility DragThing. As I recall, they all ask for the user's  
> permission before doing so, and explain exactly what data is sent;  
> we could do that too. Even Software Update sends Apple a list of  
> the Apple software you have installed, so that it can deliver to  
> you a list of applicable updates. And it does that without your  
> permission, and it's on by default, too.

Yeah, but still, this is a calculated risk for an open source project  
to take.  People have a hard enough time with software phoning home  
that's also presumably commercially vetted (and released by people  
who can also presumably get sued if it does something really  
egregious), but the wild and wooly open source stuff doesn't get much  
benefit of the doubt there at all.

I think a far better idea, and one which kills a lot more avians with  
a single projectile, is to focus on creating packaged software for  
MacPorts and a nice GUI interface for downloading it, then simply  
track the download stats (which everybody and their dog does) and  
that will give you a REAL notion of what's truly popular and what's not.

Right now, all your stats would be measuring is the activity of a  
relatively small collection of geeks who know enough to install the  
dev tools, run Terminal.app and use the port(1) command line tool.    
This may seem like a relatively large and meaningful number of people  
if you're judging solely based on a focused sampling of macports  
traffic, but in reality it's just a wee tiny drop in the bucket when  
compared to the overall, pent-up demand for add-on software for the Mac.

No offense, but your stats would literally be about as meaningful as  
taking an election poll in Joplin, Missouri and announcing the  
results on CNN.

- Jordan

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