50 million Apache OpenOffice downloads in a year

Apache OpenOffice downloads by OS
Source: Apache Software Foundation

Just a few days after the one year anniversary of the release of the first version of OpenOffice from the Apache Foundation (Apache OpenOffice 3.4) on 8 May 2012, the project can now boast 50 million downloads of the open source office suite. More than 80% of these downloads have come from Windows users, with the rest of the downloads spread between Mac OS X and Linux. Over time, the percentage of Windows users has slightly increased at the expense of Mac OS X, with Linux usage hovering steady under 5%.

Of the Windows downloads of Apache OpenOffice, most have come from Windows 7 machines (approximately 60%), followed by downloads from Windows XP (at around 30%). Windows 8 overtook Windows Vista in download numbers around the turn of the year and has since been steadily rising at the expense of all other Windows versions; it is currently responsible for approximately 20% of downloads. Where Linux packaging is concerned, there is, overall, an approximately one-to-one split between the RPM and .deb packages available to download from openoffice.org – however, the balance has shifted repeatedly back and forth during the year.

Linux distributions do not account for a large percentage of Apache OpenOffice downloads because almost all major distributions currently ship with the LibreOffice fork. The distributed nature of LibreOffice's downloads between different distributions makes it hard, if not impossible, to compare its download numbers with the Apache OpenOffice numbers that all stem from the servers of SourceForge, which manages downloads on behalf of Apache OpenOffice. Nonetheless, 50 million downloads in one year is an impressive number, especially when taking into account that the last 10 million of those downloads happened since the beginning of March. In contrast, LibreOffice claimed it had 15 million unique downloads of its office suite in all of 2012.

(fab)