Free Software Evangelism, revisited

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 00:17 +0100, Shane M. Coughlan wrote:
> If X gives a speech in Berlin and Berlin subsequently has an increase in
> Free Software projects we can assume that X is likely to have a part in
> that.  If Y gives a speech in Berlin and there is no measurable increase
> in Free Software projects we can assume that Y did not effectively
> encourage people to set up projects.

While it's a nice idea, I don't think it works in practice. You're
trying to measure indirect effects, and if that were in any way
possible, marketing would be an engineering science.

You can't assume that the speeches were anything to do with the number
of projects in an area (correlation doesn't imply causation), you can't
measure the quality or importance of a project in any quantitative
manner, and it would probably be very difficult to get an accurate
number of the projects active in any given geographic area.

Cheers,

Alex.