The open source productivity application OpenOffice.org has been downloaded almost 50 million times since the project was started, according to the company that founded the project, Sun.
Erwin Tenhumberg, a product marketing manager in Sun's client system group, told the OASIS Adoption Forum in London on Tuesday that OpenOffice.org has been downloaded "close to" 48 million times in the five years since the project was founded. Although this number may include duplicate downloads, the average user of OpenOffice downloads it six times but installs it on nine machines, according to a survey of 5000 people downloading the application that was cited by Tenhumberg.
He also pointed out that this number does not include OpenOffice.org mirror sites or open source CDs and Linux distributions that package the office productivity application.
Disks containing open source software that include OpenOffice have been distributed by a number of governments worldwide, including the Indian government, which is distributing 7 million CDs containing Tamil and Hindi versions of open source applications to the public, and the local government in the French region of Auvergne, which has distributed 64,000 packs of CDs to students.
As open source applications can be downloaded and redistributed free of charge it can be difficult to measure how many individuals and companies are using the application. Analyst firms traditionally rely on software company revenues to measure the market share of proprietary products, but no-one has found a reliable way of measuring the market share of open source products. Although download numbers can give some indication of the popularity of a product, people may not actually use the product, or may use it at the same time as another product.
The download statistics for OpenOffice.org are dwarfed by those of the open source browser Firefox, which was downloaded 10 million times within just over a month after its release in November 2004, and is now nearing 100 million downloads, according to Firefox' community marketing site, SpreadFirefox.com.
Version 2.0 of OpenOffice.org is expected to be launched this week.
Talkback
Congratulations! 50 million is a huge number and a clear sign the project has traction. It's big enough and broad enough that everyone can feel confident OpenOffice is here to stay. (Being open source helps strengthen this confidence as well, of course.)
The pace of downloads is sure to increase with the imminent release of OOo 2.0. However, to move to the next plateau, I think OOo is going to have to get beyond downloads and into OEM space. Which PC hardware maker will be the first to promote a preinstalled copy of OpenOffice as a competitive advantage? It would cost them nothing yet save their customers a great deal of money, generating goodwill and loyalty.
What about internet providers? Why not a free copy of the OOo installer on the discs you receive from AOL, PeoplePC, Earthlink, Comcast, or whatever? Again, their marketers could tout they give their customers free copies of software "worth $400!"
I think it will happen, despite this being the absolute stronghold of MS' market power. Frodo and Sam are probably heading for Mt. Doom this very minute, outside our gaze and knowledge. But we'll all see the result.
My guess is that most people get OpenOffice from other places than downloading it directly form OpenOffice.org.
As the article states, almost all Linux distributions and many schools provide OOo downloads that are not counted by OpenOffice.org statistics.
I have seen statistics that shows that OOo allready have a greater market share than the latest version of MS Office and I guess that market share will increase as Microsoft releases Office-12 switching from some older MS-Office version to OOo 2.x will require much less training than switching to MS-Office-12 that will have a completely new userinterface.
The free and well documented file format will appeal to governments and other organizations that need long term information security. I would expect that the use of OpenOffice and other OpenDocument compatible office software will grow rapidly over the years to com. I woudln't be surprised if such software held 50% of the market in five years.
I'd like to see a new count of OOo 2.0 only once it comes out for final release. Is there any way to get numbers from all the mirrors or some other way to get reliable number of installations data? microsoft has it easy with counting since payment is required. Other than using spyware or relying on statistical extrapolation, is there a way to get an accurate count?
I'd like to read more about the Indian Government's localized OSS CDs. OOo was one of the packages on the CDs. Have they gotten to versions for all the official languages yet?