FAQ

• What is this ?
  This site is a replacement for the old FreeBSD Counter Page. We are trying to figure out what is the installed base of the BSDs. Why do we need to know what the installed base is? Good question. When the people from the various BSD groups go to the Hardware and application vendors asking for support the question that decides wether the vendor will support us or not is often What is the installed base of {Free|Net|Open}BSD?

  If the BSD groups mumbles "Don't know" then end of discussion with the vendor. We need to be able to say with some certainty what we think what our installed base is. Of course, we can't say with absolute certainty what the count is but we can estimate as the Linux Counter does.

• What about Linux ?
  Well. Linux is a fine OS but we are into FreeBSD so we focus on BSD. Besides, Harald Tveit Alvestrand is doing a great job with the Linux Counter

• What about Microsoft ?
  Go away. We have no interest in Microsoft and its products except for the welcome news of the impending collapse of Microsoft.

• What happened to the FreeBSD Counter Page ?
  We started out doing the FreeBSD Counter but after some time we found that the site had some major flaws. One of these flaws was a lack of representation on the other BSDs. So rather that patch the flaws we decided to totally rewrite the entire site and include the other BSDs.

• What do I do with my old FreeBSD Counter registration?
  Most of the records from the old FreeBSD Counter have been transfered over to this new site. The old site was keyed to email addresses and user id. We are still keying on the email address and user ids.

  The old user id was in the form "FBSDxxxxxx". The new user ids are in the form "BSDxxxxxx". The old user ids have been trimmed of the leading "F". If you are trying add machine registrations or update your record please use your existing user id without the leading F.

• What runs this site ?
  This site runs on an Pentium III 850MHz with 256meg of ram and 81 gig of disk. The OS is, of course, FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE. The software running this site is Perl, Apache, and MySQL. We are in the process of looking into upgrading the database from MySQL to InterBase

• Who is running this site ?
  This site is run by a few people from BAFUG. We are always looking for people who love *BSD and like to hack Perl and PHP. This current collection of the Usual Suspects that are to blame for this.

• What is your Privacy Policy ?
  Our Privacy Policy is very simple. Your information is yours. We may from time to time share some information with and only with those leading the various BSD groups but that is all. No one else will ever see your information. PERIOD!

  We make every effort to make sure that all of our data is secure. If this project ever ends you can rest assured that the database will get wiped and all backups as well.

• Hey! Last time I looked the count was 43,000 now it's at 50,000. What gives?
  The BSD Counter page is a work in progress. The orignial database was on a disk that turned up dead so we do not have a perfect dump. We have been importing data from various locations and storage formats. We now have imported all the data from the old site so the state of database now is about where it was before the disk went south.

• Why are there so many FreeBSD users and almost no other BSD users?
  The BSD Counter page started life as a FreeBSD counter page. We collected user IDs for 2 years. It has only been in the last month or so that we have been keeping count of other BSDs. The current state of the count does not represent the real world accounting of BSD users. We have no idea what the correct percentages is. This will correct it self in due time.