OpenOffice.org: 10 Million Downloads in 4 weeks

WOW!

Early on Sunday morning, the OpenOffice.org Community passed the ten million downloads mark for the latest version of its software, just four weeks after the launch on October 13th. The week also marked the first time the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference has been held outside Europe.

And this is only from the OOo servers. This doesn’t include mirrors and installs from distribution packages.

John McCreesh, Marketing Project Lead, explained the importance of the two events. “Since the launch of OpenOffice.org 3.0, we have had a verifiable record of downloads from central website. We were delighted to hit a million downloads in the first two days. Four weeks later, we have hit ten million, and we are still seeing an amazing 250,000 – 350,000 downloads a day. For a community with no advertising budget, this is an astonishing level of product awareness around the world. Add to this the success of our Beijing Conference, and there can be no doubt that OpenOffice.org is now genuinely a global phenomenon.”

That is just so brilliant.

Aren’t the UK Government are looking to save some cash… I wonder how much goes to M$ just on MS OfficeTM Licenses each year???

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3 Comments

  • Martyn says:

    >>I wonder how much goes to M$ just on MS OfficeTM Licenses each year???

    1% off income tax I reckon (= £2 billion pa)

    Well… at an IT steering group I went to earlier this year the Local Authority IT manager reckoned they budgeted £250k for their latest M$ upgrade – not sure if this was just office or servers as well.

    And since we know most govt/LA IT projects massively overrun their budgets I’d say that’s £0.5 million down the tube. And since there are 4 district councils in my county, plus the county council….. you get the picture.

    GAH! I’m now really cross thinking about this!

  • Alan Lord says:

    Lol. Thanks Martyn,

    I thought about trying to gestimate the figure but it made my head hurt… I really do shudder to think how much we send to Uncle Sam each year for software that we don’t need.

    Although I guess now we hear about stupid numbers to bail out the banks, a few million here or there seems less significant somehow. (I bet “Maggy” wouldn’t have been so cavalier with our cash however…)

  • wayne says:

    Just make an FOI request to your local council to get the details, once contracts are awarded commercial exemptions don’t apply so you can find the full costs of these contracts. In Worcestershire they paid £516.5k for a 3 year contract for Office 2007 on around 2900 desktops. I think the equivilient for Star Office would be something like £170k.

    They argue that because they use Exchange server they have to have Office 2007 (depsite the fact they could replace that with Zimbra for £30k!).

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