The Open Sourcerer

OpenOffice.org saves you £30Million/day…

… by my reckoning at least.

Take a look at this chart (click for a bigger image):

That looks to be a rough average of about 300,000 downloads of the free and open source OpenOffice.org application suite every day for the last 28 days, which means about 8.5Million downloads this month. So to me, that works out something like this:

If MS Office is worth about £100 (I guess that’s a reasonable average price) then that’s about £30Million pounds worth of software being downloaded for free every day.

In the last 28 days, that works out at about £840Million, or in US Dollars about $1.25Billion at the current exchange rate.

Now according to the OpenOffice.org’s bouncer today (02/12/2008), there have been a bit less than 18Million¹ downloads so far since the release of OOo 3.0 on the 13th October. Or, to put it another way:

worth of software since launch.

How much does our government spend on MSO licenses each year? Think they should stop wasting their money? Fortunately, if it carries on like this, they will probably have to upgrade to OpenOffice.org

[1] Please see the Bouncer FAQ for more details on what is recorded, but be aware that this number is probably very low in actuality:

Does the Bouncer provide the full story?

No! – it only records downloads started a single point, the OpenOffice.org download page. It omits:

• downloads which people make directly from mirrors
• downloads via other mechanisms, such as peer-to-peer networks
• downloads from other third-party repositories – including GNU/Linux distributions (see next question)

Note also that the Bouncer logs when it successfully redirects someone to a download site – if the user chooses not to download, or cancels the download, then the Bouncer will not be aware.

Another tale of Open Sourcery

Martyn, from Severn Delta Ltd, emailed me saying he had an Open Source story to tell. I’ve had this in my inbox for a while now, but have finally got round to publishing it.

Alan,

I own 50% of a manufacturing company in Bridgwater. When we bought the company out of receivership in ’03 we had no systems at all. Our former parent company was running a character based ERP system called MAX on Unix and a Windows file serving network.

So day 1 (ish!) we set up two RH servers and installed samba, sendmail, apache etc on one for file print intranet and email and the Linux port of MAX on the other.

See this post for some other detail.

http://blogs.severndelta.co.uk/?p=5

We have not been able to find a “right-sized” ERP solution for our needs to replace the ageing character based system (which had been “sunsetted” by infor in ’05). We also needed some form of CRM package to mange the growth of the company once we had moved into our new building in ’05.

So…. we decided to develop our own system in combination with an open source CRM package from a company called Senokian Solutions (http://www.senokian.com) called EGS.

EGS is PHP/Ajax based and runs against PostgreSQL. It also has its own development framework based on MVC that allows you to add modules. EGS 2.0 core has CRM, Project Management, Ticketing modules and a framework that allows for integrated e-commerce apps and site content management. It is free and open source.

The tools on which the system is built are:
Linux (Ubuntu)
Apache
PostgreSQL
PHP 5
Ajax
Smarty Template Engine
EZ pdf
XML/SWF Charts

In November 2006 I took on a developer, Dave Easeman, to help code the accounts/ERP system as I specified it – we are now 99% of the way through – although I guess we will never finish the project! We are about to go live (Jan 1st) and then the aim is to polish everything up in Quarter 1/2 2009.

See here for a link on our blog
http://blogs.severndelta.co.uk/?p=58

Maybe what I’ll do is update you as we progress to “go live” on Jan 1.

Regards

Martyn Shiner
Financial Director
Severn Delta Limited

Thanks for the story Martyn, it’s very encouraging how companies such as yours (i.e. not some global enterprise with billions of dollars in the bank) are able to deploy, manage, run and develop their own IT systems using FOSS. This is a great example of just how flexible and accessible FOSS really is.

I love this quote (from the first blog link):

I will never buy a Windows based PC ever again.

Are you listening Bill?

That was written in August last year. I’m interested if you have managed to stick to that goal Martyn?

Good luck with your deployment. I genuinely hope it goes well, and please do keep us updated on your progress. You seem to have a similar tenacity to Adrian Steele at Mercian Labels who has also been blogging about their own migration to FOSS. And they also developed a core application from scratch too – for them it was a CRM/MIS app.