

Apache OpenOffice has reached an impressive 40 million downloads since May 2012

Source: The Apache Software Foundation

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that since the release of Apache OpenOffice 3.4.0 in May 2012, it has seen 40 million downloads of the 3.4.x release series. This number counts only raw downloads of full install images from SourceForge; language packs and source tarballs were not counted. The ASF has released a comma-delimited text file with the download numbers for every individual day and has plotted the results in a graph showing the cumulative and daily downloads.

In comparison, The Document Foundation, which releases the LibreOffice fork of the OpenOffice.org code base, claimed 15 million unique downloads for all of its released versions for the entirety of 2012 back in December. That number is based on "downloads from unique IPs", although the LibreOffice developers do not explain if this means unique IPs over the course of the whole year or a more traditional definition of unique IPs in terms of days or weeks. The Document Foundation also presumes its figures exclude Linux users as they "with very few exceptions, do not download LibreOffice as they can get the software from the repository of their distribution".

Even though most modern Linux distributions are now shipped with LibreOffice by default, Apache OpenOffice's 40 million downloads in just under ten months are an impressive achievement, especially considering that they only encompass one release version. The numbers also suggest that the Windows and Mac OS X versions comprise a significant amount of the total downloads of both projects.

(fab)