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OpenOffice in Italian Emilia-Romagna to save 2 million | Joinup.

This datum follows on the heels of a second day of record downloads of Apache OpenOffice. On 9 October, we recorded 241,987 downloads; on Monday, 233,070. These are, as I and others noted, impressive numbers.

But how impressive? We used to claim, in the days of OOo, that there were roughly 100M users of OOo and many times that of downloads. (This is not counting those who obtain their OOo from installed Linux distributions or who get one CDROM and then install it in an enterprise.)

Well, Rob Weir, of IBM, and with the AOO project (as am I), gave an insightful response to a query of mine posted to the public dev@openoffice.apache.org list:

Do we have any ideas how the other openoffice versions are doing in terms of download ? if they publish their numbers we could think about a blog post telling about the total number, that must be impressive. 

Some of them did publish download numbers, but stopped doing so after AOO 3.4.0 was released and we started publishing our numbers.

But it is hard to come up with apples-to-apples comparisons.  For example, Linux users get LO with their distro.  They don’t download.

LO has been available for 3 years, but AOO for only 18 months.  We’re counting only full installs, LO is counting — well, we really don’t know.   The products have different update cycles, so it is hard to convert downloads into users. (If you have many small releases then each user will generate several downloads).  Differences like this make it hard to compare the two.

But one approach is to look at Windows downloads from 3rd party websites, like download.com.  This avoids all of the above problems. If you look there you see that in the last week AOO has been downloaded 21,850 times, and LibreOffice 2,664 times.

But from the perspective of ODF editors, Microsoft has pretty good ODF support now as well, so the true number of ODF editor installs is probably near 1 billion now.