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I am the Founder of "Little Apps" which is a company that creates open source software licensed under the GNU GPLv3. I am trying to find a solution to track how many people are using our software that is free or affordable. After browsing other posts, I was able to find the following solutions:

  • DeskMetrics (free for 1 app or $189/month for 2)
  • Aternity (Doesnt list price)
  • PreEmptive Runtime Intelligence (Unable to find community version on my VS2010?)

I am wondering if anyone knows of any other better solution or if there's a way to integrate it with Piwik? Something else I could do too is create a simple PHP script to track software installs.

Thanks!

SameOldNick
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2 Answers2

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To get the free Runtime Intelligence in your VS2010 installation you need to have installed Dotfuscator Community Edition. This is because Dotfuscator provides the code injection functionality that powers Runtime Intelligence on the client. You do not need to obfuscate anything, we just use the same tool to perform instrumentation and/or obfuscation.

For the past few years PreEmptive has partnered with CodePlex to provide our commercial level Runtime Intelligence product to open source applications hosted on CodePlex. There is a walkthough here that is targeted at instrumenting apps for CodePlex but the same steps apply to any application (although you will need to use a different endpoint).

For the server side reporting of usage you currently have three options with Runtime Intelligence.

  1. Use the absolutely free endpoint and portal that are the default with applications instrumented with Dotfuscator CE. Your data will be visible on the free portal. This is an older version of our portal but it does provide usage data.
  2. If you are hosted on CodePlex you can take advantage of the CodePlex partnership to use the full commercial portal as detailed in the above tutorial. One advantage to this is if you are a qualifying open source application you are eligible for a free license to the commercial version of Dotfuscator which gives you even more instrumentation options than are available in the free version.
  3. If you want to host your own server you can use the Runtime Intelligence Endpoint Starter Kit as a basis for creating your own server to store and report on usage data. This would also be an excellent way to integrate application usage data into Piwik.
Joe Kuemerle
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Could you not use clickonce and count your inbound requests - each install could have a unique id and when it queries the server for updated code - you could count it as being a active user.

Suggest a method for auto-updating my C# program

Community
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FiveTools
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  • I am not a fan of ClickOnce, mainly because its more for web apps and I prefer NSIS because it is more customizable and more what I need. – SameOldNick Jul 20 '11 at 05:47