Ubuntu – Why doesn’t Canonical and Ubuntu run more ads

There are several issues with this level of tracking:

1. As others have said in this thread, most people use the most geographically "relevant" mirror possible as it speeds things up for them. These mirrors are mostly not under the control of Canonical.

   Even if Canonical could grab the remote logs, there'd be international privacy laws to obey which would end up with users perhaps having to agree to multiple agreements depending on the jurisdiction of a chosen server.

2. Some people don't use public mirrors at all. If you're using Ubuntu in a farm or corporate scenario over dozens or hundreds of machines (anything over three machines would make sense IMO), people proxy the repositories so only the first hit would count.

3. Some people could just beat on the refresh link all day. Not only would that skquiff the statistics but it would also gum the servers up more than they needed to be.

4. Sometimes it's better not to know.

   It sounds stupid but one of my jobs is maintaining a webapp for a company that several large businesses use to train their employees. I've talked about adding extra data collection so we have a better idea what a user is doing as that would be handy for improvement but if we collect that data (and advertise that fact, as we're required to by UK law), our clients will expect to know the results of our collection.

   That's fine if the data shows strong growth (or lots of their employees using the webapp in my case) but if it doesn't, it can really undermine marketing efforts. Not all data can be spun into something positive.

   Because the data would not be a full representation of all users, any statistics drawn would be lower than actual values and Microsoft (et al) could very quickly bomb them with a few sales stats.

There is a package for OEM installs called canonical-census but as I've already detailed this only works for OEM installs. Read the link to see how it works but I will say it's slightly better than repo-logging.

I guess one question to ask you back would be: Why do Canonical need these numbers? Even if they were great results, the problem still exists that there just isn't that much money to market Ubuntu. And if they weren't as stellar as needed for certain advertising claims (or weren't released for that reason), the collection would certainly undermine the project.

Unfortunately, this same exact question could be posed by Ubuntu users in any other country. Now that China has Ubuntu stores, everyone else wants them. Opening up stores takes time, and canonical has to decide where they want to put they're money to make a store. They'll build stores wherever the most loyal Ubuntu users are - and if that's in India, then so be it. You should contribute to the thread on Ubuntu brainstorm. This is not really they type of question that belongs on Ask Ubuntu.