marketing: Download Statistics

From time to time I'm asked about download stats. I used to keep a fairly constant (weekly) log at stats.openoffice.org, but technology changes and right now, the best public source is off the OOo Marketing Project page, which John McC and Florian E. maintain using data from our bouncer and MirrorBrain systems. See: http://marketing.openoffice.org/marketing_bouncer.html. All the data here presented need to be taken with some understanding of what's being shown, both to forgive duplicates and also to allow for the distribution of OOo via CDROM, DVD, USB key, etc. These modes are not trivial, if you consider that a large entity, say Île-de-France (Paris and environs), or the municipality of Bologna, may distribute in the end hundreds of thousands via USB key. And we don't track that. As well, most of these data reflect Windows downloads, as Linux distributors package a version of OOo with their plastic, and again, we don't track those distributions. Same for free-download sites such as CNET, etc.

(See also our Major Deployments page: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments

So there are subtractions and additions here, but the numbers displayed give a good measure of OOo's continually rising popularity.