Another Important Item...

is our Business Plan. We are developing the plan now. One of the harder things to estimate is the BSD market- BSD system usage, worldwide, for any of the four major projects. I've looked for previous market studies and haven't found much at all.

There was Henry Norrs SF Chronicle article, the controversial mi2g.com security study, and Sean Michael Kerners article in ineternetnews.com.

Not surprisingly, the most informative article was from Netcraft, and it provided the most specific detail on BSD usage yet- 2.5 million FreeBSD servers in use in 2004. Perhaps they have additional detail on the other projects.

If you have any information on BSD usage, (production, staging, lab, personal, whatever) we'd like to hear from you. We are currently developing a survey to gather this information.

Ideally, we'd like to know:

1. Which BSD flavors are in use and how many of each? (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD)
2. How many BSD systems are in use?
   
3. How many admins are maintaing these systems?
4. What services are being provided?
5. How large is the organization?
6. What industry?
   

There are a few more questions. A sample set of questions is being posted to the BSDCert mailing list today. The actual survey will be announced in the next few days.

Comments and suggestions are welcome here or on the list.