{"id":2045,"date":"2012-10-31T07:39:39","date_gmt":"2012-10-31T11:39:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/?p=2045"},"modified":"2013-12-16T17:10:09","modified_gmt":"2013-12-16T22:10:09","slug":"libreoffices-dubious-claims-part-i-downloads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/2012\/10\/libreoffices-dubious-claims-part-i-downloads.html","title":{"rendered":"LibreOffice’s Dubious Claims: Part I, Download Counts"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This post represents my personal opinion only.\u00a0 The standard disclaimer<\/a> applies.)<\/p>\n

Part II is here<\/a> and Part III is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Claims<\/h3>\n

I’ve recently read some implausible claims from the LibreOffice project,\u00a0 concerning their stats for downloads and users.\u00a0 (These two different statistics are unfortunately conflated in their publicity campaigns, but more about that later).\u00a0\u00a0 Their claims fall apart if given any scrutiny and placed against comparable numbers from Apache OpenOffice.\u00a0 I think you’ll agree by the time you are done reading my analysis .<\/p>\n

If this were merely yet another case of puffery from the LibreOffice marketing department then I might just let it go, as I have with many other similar claims in the past couple of years.\u00a0 But to the extent that some people seem\u00a0 take these claims as facts, and are repeating, them, then I hope I will be forgiven for giving truth a chance to be heard.\u00a0 I’ll\u00a0 lay out the numbers as I know them and let you be the judge.<\/p>\n

First, what do we have on the Apache OpenOffice side?\u00a0 Most of our downloads are from our download site hosted by SourceForge.\u00a0 The download stats are public and exposed by SourceForge via their REST API<\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0 We gather these stats with a Python script (also public here<\/a>) and that data is saved to a data file<\/a>, which is then plotted on our website<\/a>.\u00a0 So everything is open and transparent here.\u00a0 The downloads are counted by a respected 3rd party and the entire processing of these numbers is open for inspection.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is all there, day-to-day, including breakdown by country and operating system.\u00a0 We have nothing to hide.<\/p>\n

The LibreOffice numbers, on the other hand, we only know from download claims in press releases, and then only at long intervals.\u00a0 We have no idea what exactly they are counting.\u00a0 They have never made the detailed stats public.\u00a0 This does not mean that the numbers are incorrect of course.\u00a0 It just means that no one outside of their project’s leadership is able to verify the claims.<\/p>\n

Actual Numbers<\/h3>\n

But taken for what its worth, let’s look the recent LibreOffice claims and compare it to the actual data posted by Apache.<\/p>\n