Last week (CI No 3,347), we posted a letter from one of our readers casting doubt upon the much used claim that there are five million Linux developers. Now Steve McIntyre of Cambridge, UK, a mainainer and developer for the Linux-based Debian free operating system project, offers his own comments: The Linux Counter at http://counter.li.org/ is presumably the source of the quoted figure of five million Linux users. Detailed breakdowns of registered Linux users are available from that site, with some explanation of the statistics. Your reader would be well advised to look at the figures available. For a start, Linux is in use by far more people than just the small fraction of professional software developers listed in the US. Many ISPs and other companies around the world have found Linux to be useful, both on workstations and servers, as have a large number of academics. The figure of five million is in fact a compromise number – some people would place the actual value far higher. To answer his other question, there are a growing number of native applications for Linux; with the steadily-improving DOS and Windows emulators many PC-centric applications are now supported. For those less sceptical, more information is to be found on http://www.li.org/. More information on the Debian project can be found at http//www.debian.org/.
