>>>>> On Fri, 02 Oct 92 01:57:25 GMT, donadio@wilbur.psu.edu (Beaker) said:

Beaker> Just out of curiosity, is there an estimate to the number of people
Beaker> running linux in one way or another?

When comp.os.linux was created more than 800 people did vote for it
(very few newsgroups have got more votes), and I believe most of those
people use Linux. That was in last spring when Linux wasn't very
"mature" yet and not so many did know about it, Linux user base has
grown rapidly after that.  

USENET readership report for Sep 92 says:

        +-- Estimated total number of people who read the group, worldwide.
        |     +-- Actual number of readers in sampled population
        |     |     +-- Propagation: how many sites receive this group at all
        |     |     |      +-- Recent traffic (messages per month)
        |     |     |      |      +-- Recent traffic (kilobytes per month)
        |     |     |      |      |      +-- Crossposting percentage
        |     |     |      |      |      |    +-- Cost ratio: $US/month/rdr
        |     |     |      |      |      |    |      +-- Share: % of newsrders
        |     |     |      |      |      |    |      |   who read this group.
        V     V     V      V      V      V    V      V
   1 160000  5317   83%   980  1933.6    22%  0.02  11.5%  misc.jobs.offered 
   2 160000  5142   82%  1568  1909.7    40%  0.02  11.1%  misc.forsale 
   3 150000  4788   89%    10   157.9   100%  0.00  10.3%  news.announce.newusers 
   4 120000  3910   68%  2556  6290.4    45%  0.07   8.4%  alt.sex 
    ......
  75  42000  1398   82%   540  1002.4    21%  0.04   3.0%  comp.os.msdos.programmer 
  87  41000  1345   81%   305   437.2    13%  0.02   2.9%  comp.os.msdos.misc 
 144  33000  1080   79%  2615  4157.5     4%  0.19   2.3%  comp.os.os2.misc 
 196  29000   951   79%    52   116.2    16%  0.01   2.1%  comp.os.mach 
 231  27000   889   68%   803  1113.6    11%  0.05   1.9%  comp.os.ms-windows.apps 
 262  25000   830   81%    10    11.1    10%  0.00   1.8%  comp.os.misc 
 273  24000   800   78%   820  1225.3    15%  0.08   1.7%  comp.os.os2.apps 
 335  22000   733   71%  2392  4082.2     2%  0.26   1.6%  comp.os.linux  <---
 365  21000   705   83%   139   327.0     5%  0.03   1.5%  comp.os.minix 
 606  15000   498   76%   688   988.4     0%  0.10   1.1%  comp.os.coherent 

======
So estimated number of people who read c.o.l is 22000, that is an
estimate only and not all who read c.o.l use Linux. There are of
course many many people who don't read news and c.o.l and who use Linux.

Based on all this information my estimate of Linux users is 10,000-100,000.
Feel free to critisize my estimation....


-Heikki

--
                                                Heikki Suopanki
                                                suopanki@zombie.oulu.fi 
                                                                 
                                                more space needed