If you have a few minutes to spare this weekend, and haven’t done this yet, contribute just a few minutes to the open source census. What’s the aim of the Census? Pretty ambitious:

The Open Source Census is the first collaborative, global project to count the number of installations for each open source software package. We realize that’s pretty ambitious, but we figure you have to think big. Of course, we know we can’t count every single installation of open source software in the world, but we believe it’s possible to obtain a sample large enough to be representative.

Since open source is not subject to a single point of control, it’s really hard to gather accurate data. So it’s vitally important for open source advocates to participate in efforts like this to help gather more accurate data.

Instructions are here - it’s really simple and only takes a little while. I think it took about 15 minutes on my ThinkPad T61 for the scanner to run, but it’s something you can kick off and then go do something else. So, download the client, register with the project, and then run the client before you go out to lunch or start your normal weekend activities — it’ll be done long before you come back.

So, take a few minutes to be counted, and have a lot of fun this weekend.

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