Fedora announced this month that by using a tracking tool to monitor unique IP addresses, it was able to determine that Fedora Core 6 now has more than one million users. Fedora decided to track metrics with the release of Fedora Core 6 (FC6) because the lack of data from previous releases made it difficult to be sure what users value in Fedora Core packages. Not only does the data help with improving future releases, it also attests to the growing number of Linux users within the computing community which, in turn, may spur hardware vendors into offering more Linux-friendly goods and services.

Fedora's metrics have ripple effect