In 1996 ICQ achieved a record 65,000 downlaods in 2 months - all through word of mouth.  Or should I say click of mouse?  Skype was next to beat the record with 25 million downloads in 19 months.

Firefox set the bar even higher with 50 million downloads in 6 months.

Now with version 3 of the browser, they may just break their own record.  Within the first 4 hours of the release of Firefox 3, 1 million downloads were reported.  After 24 hours, 8 million downloads were reported.

We know that Microsoft is looking into how open source and Linux will affect their bottom line and what to do about it.   

"On Tuesday, Microsoft announced that it's extending its management software to Linux and Unix environments by integrating some of the open source OpenPegasus project's code into System Center Operations Manager, and will contribute back." Full Story...

Not only will MS use open source, but they will contribute back.  I wonder just how half-assed this contribution will be.  MS's "contributions" are always such that they can benefit or they do things in such a way as to try to lead the industry where they want it to be.  Just look at the Open Document crap they tried to pull.

Bruce Perens is a Linux and Free Software advocate and he has been for 20 years now.  Watch this video interview of him explaining how it all started.   Some of his roots began with Debian and Pixar (that's right, the movie making Pixar company that we all know and love).

Pretty cool video.  He's a pretty good speaker too, very natural. 

The Ubducted (those that succumb to the power of Linux and Open source) are being tracked, but in a good way.  The Open Source Census aims to count the number of installations of Open Source software globally.  They do realize it is an ambitious goal to count all installations, but they think they can achieve relatively representative samples to make some solid arguments about the totals.

The focus is to count installations in the Enterprise ecosystem, but individuals are allowed to participate as well.  There are many ways to participate, and when you do you get access to some reports. 

They identify 3 main reasons for participating.  They include:

• Keeping an inventory of your open source software
• Generating benchmarks of open source usage (useful for comparing yourself to other companies and for identifying any internal trends)
• Aids in overall growth of the open source community and improvement of open source products
  

You can view some of the final results here.  You can also be assured that no personally identifiable information is collected.  So you've got nothing to lose!  To begin to submit scans of your systems, start here.

As you know, I installed Mandriva on my EeePC.  I chose to do the network install which required I boot from a USB stick.  In order to get the image on the USB stick, one could use WinImage, but I just couldn't get it to work. 

Instead, I used "dd" which is available on all linux machines.  However, I was on my Windows machine at the time, so I searched for dd for windows.  To no surprise, such a project existed and it worked wonderfully.