{"id":1976,"date":"2012-06-22T14:28:04","date_gmt":"2012-06-22T18:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/?p=1976"},"modified":"2012-06-22T14:28:04","modified_gmt":"2012-06-22T18:28:04","slug":"pache-openoffice-34-downloads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/pache-openoffice-34-downloads.html","title":{"rendered":"Perspectives on Apache OpenOffice 3.4 download numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You may have read, on the Apache OpenOffice blog<\/a>, news that the project has had 5 million downloads in the first 6 weeks since the release of version 3.4.\u00a0 And as the above chart shows, the download rate has increased in the past two weeks, as we’ve started to roll out the upgrade notifications to OpenOffice.org 3.3 users.<\/p>\n

When I mention the “5 million” achievement, the reaction is generally along the lines of, “That’s excellent !!!\u00a0 Right?\u00a0 That is good, isn’t it?”\u00a0 The fact is the number is large, but without comparison or context, it is hard to gauge.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I think I can provide some comparisons and context to put these numbers in perspective.<\/p>\n

First, let’s look at OpenOffice.org 3, and their famous claim of 100 million downloads.\u00a0 That was in the time period from October 13, 2008 to October 28, 2009, so 380 days.\u00a0 That averages out to around 260K downloads\/day.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m not quite sure what they counted as a “download”, whether just full installers, or language packs as well.\u00a0\u00a0 And that time period overlaps with several releases (3.0.0, 3.0.1, 3.1.0 and 3.1.1, so there is some double, triple and quadruple counting of users due to upgrades.<\/p>\n

For another comparison, let’s take a look at LibreOffice.\u00a0 They claimed 7.5 million downloads between January 2011 and October 2011.\u00a0 That averages out to 27K downloads\/day. \u00a0\u00a0 And again, it is not clear if that counts all downloads, including multiple downloads by the same user as they update from release to release.<\/p>\n

So how does Apache OpenOffice 3.4 compare?\u00a0 Let’s state the numbers as conservatively as we can.\u00a0 We’ll count only installer downloads, not language packs or SDK’s.\u00a0 And we’re counting only for a single release, AOO 3.4, so there is no double counting due to upgrades.\u00a0 Based on these assumptions, our average download rate has been 118K downloads\/day.\u00a0 (But as the chart shows, since we enabled the update notifications, the rate is now more like 170K downloads\/day.<\/p>\n

So overall I think we’re doing quite well.\u00a0\u00a0 There is room for improvement, but it is a good baseline against which we can show progress.\u00a0 One thing we can do to grow these numbers to increase the native language support, to restore some of the key translations.\u00a0\u00a0 If you are interested in volunteering with Apache OpenOffice, you should read this page<\/a>, and then send an email to our mailing list<\/a> to introduce yourself and your interest.<\/p>\n

A quick side note:\u00a0 Some readers will observe that Linux users get their software from the distros, not from downloading from a website.\u00a0 This is a safe assumption for most, but not all Linux users.\u00a0 But that doesn’t really change the math much.\u00a0 Assume that none of the LibreOffice downloads are from Linux users.\u00a0 Assume that the entire 27K\/day are entirely Windows and Mac users.\u00a0\u00a0 Then, we can do an apples-to-apples comparison to the Apache OpenOffice numbers, where we know that only 3% of the downloads are from Linux users.\u00a0 So the better comparison would then be to compare\u00a0 a very conservative 0.97 * 118K = 114 K\/day versus LO’s best-case 27K\/day for Windows and Mac.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A similar calculation could be done on the legacy OOo 3 figure, with similar results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may have read, on the Apache OpenOffice blog, news that the project has had 5 million downloads in the first 6 weeks since the release of version 3.4.\u00a0 And as the above chart shows, the download rate has increased in the past two weeks, as we’ve started to roll out the upgrade notifications to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[211,22],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1976","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-apache","7":"category-openoffice","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1976"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1980,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1976\/revisions\/1980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}