The Goldfish Chronicles

Came across the Alfresco Open Source Barometer while catching up on planetapache. Reading it, the first thing that jumps out is a dumb piece of analysis.

On Page 6, it shows the breakdown geographically of respondents by %age. The US is far out in the lead with 22%, then France with 9%, and so on through the big European countries with the UK at 4.5%. The finding is that “the US is leading open source adoption globally. We believe the Global 2000 is seeking innovation… whereas in Europe open source adoption is driven by governments”. Also that the UK lags behind other European countries.

Somebody appears to be taking stupid pills. The news that the US has 5 times the users of Alfresco than the UK is oddly similar to the US population being 5 times the UKs. It’s an assumption to assume that this maps onto the relative sizes of their business communities, but I suspect the assumption is the other way and the US business population is more than 5 times the UKs.

It’s also no great shock to see Germany being significantly larger than Italy or the UK 6% vs 4% - again the population balances out nicely there. The bigger surprises are 9% for France and 6% for much smaller in population Spain.

So, step 1) they left population out of the equation, and step 2) it wouldn’t help to be doing per capita anyway as all this really talks about is Alfresco, not Open Source.

Sorry about that rant… the ‘analysis’ on that page irritated the hell out of me.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 12:42 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.