-The reason for this counting is two things, firstly we sincerely do
-want to know what our user-base is, secondly a lot of people use this
-counter to measure the merits of the various PC-UNIX offerings.
-
-The FreeBSD team does not think this is a perfect way of doing things,
-but as I said, in the absence of any other mechanism. But even as it
-has shortcommings, it is usefull, and we thank Harald for his service.
-
-Included below is the blurp from the counter.
+The justification for such "registration" is twofold: First, we sincerely do
+wish to know just what the size and demographics of our user-base are
+in order to better support its needs. Second, it's a sad fact that many
+people rely on counters and statistics (even when highly dubious) rather
+than actual experience when chosing an operating system, and the best we
+can hope to do in such circumstances is to at least try to provide some
+indication of how popular we are (or are not). This is not how we recommend
+that people go about chosing an operating system, but the necessity of
+"marketing" remains an undeniable fact of life.
+
+The FreeBSD team does not necessarily feel that Harald's counter represents
+the best approach to such statistics gathering, and its accuracy will only
+be as good as people's willingness to register with it (which may not reflect
+the actual OS population at any single point in time), but in the total absence
+of any other mechanism for providing such useful statistics, it's certainly a
+start and we thank Harald for his efforts in providing this service.
+It's a community service, and of potential benefit to everyone (all *BSD
+users), so let's see if we can't make it work!
+
+Included below is the standard blurb from the counter.
projects / unix-history / blobdiff