The Guardian publishes Open Source Apps are No Small Free Beer, analyzing how their free cost is leading to a major boost in interest during this great downturn.

There cannot be a corner of the industrialised world that doesn’t rely on some form of free software. But free software, and the open source movement it inspired, has so far affected mostly the back-end world of servers and databases, or taken over from software, like the web browser, that was already available at zero cost.

Until now, suggests the Guardian, looking specifically at OpenOffice.org:

Take OpenOffice, the leading alternative to a paid-for “proprietary” software application. As the downturn started, its download figures began to rocket. According to Oregon State University, since it launched its third version in mid-October, OpenOffice has been downloaded more than 42m times. That’s roughly four times (3.75) every second.

Recent efforts have been made to analyze usage share of OpenOffice to see whether it is displacing users from Microsoft Office.

In November, the US analyst Clickstream reported (http://bit.ly/open2) that 5% of internet users used OpenOffice in the last six months. By comparison, 51% used Microsoft Office, suggesting that Microsoft had 10 times as many users as OpenOffice. But this also suggests that Microsoft’s dominance could be declining, as three years ago it enjoyed 95% of the market.

Not only is OpenOffice showing strongly in  competition with MSO, but this information also shows MSO has a much lower usage than many IT analysts assume, if only half of internet users are opening it in a six-month period.

In the public sector, for governments around the world, OpenOffice is proving to be even more popular.

From Birmingham to Brussels, local and regional governments are switching to OpenOffice in a bid to confront the hegemony of Microsoft. “The idea of using open source software not originated by an American multinational corporation seems to go down particularly well in the French public service,” says John McCreesh, marketing project lead of OpenOffice.org.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 10:12 am and is filed under Open Source, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.