This is not a Guinness, but is definitely a world record
During the second day of availability of OpenOffice.org 3.0, the suite has been downloaded 620.000 times at worldwide level (all languages, all flavours) and 50.000 times in Italy (the Italian version). This brings the total for the first two days, respectively, to 1.010.000 and 82.000.
The average OOo download is quite sizeable at 142MB. Therefore, during the two days, the total Internet traffic generated has been 150.3TB at worldwide level (58TB on the 13th and and 92.3TB on the 14th) and 12.2TB in Italy (4.8TB on the 13th and 7.4TB on the 14th).
Firefox, during the Guiness World Record set for the availability of Firefox 3, has been downloaded 8 million times at worldwide level and 320.000 times in Italy. With an average download of 7.8MB, the volume of Internet traffic generated has been 65.4TB at worldwide level and 2.6TB in Italy.
While Firefox downloads have been certified, OpenOffice.org download have not been certified. This means that the OOo counter does not represent the real figure but just a fair percentage of it as several language projects do not rely completely on it, and there are servers that mirror “unofficially” the real ones.
If you have had some problems while trying to download OpenOffice.org 3.0 during the last two days, now you understand the reason. Although my calculations are not “scientific” (my degrees are in geography and journalism), they are extremely close to the reality (as usual, I have underestimated OOo data and rounded them to the lower thousand).
OpenOffice.org 3.0 has been an incredible success, which has gone beyond every optimistic forecast. Although we have not set a Guinness, we have probably established a world record for the amount of Internet traffic generated in a day.
It is probably time, for the industry analysts, to give OpenOffice.org the market share it deserves. Of course, it’s a difficult task, because the adoption patterns of free software are different from those of proprietary software (which, most of the times, comes preinstalled on the PC).
Free software is downloaded when the PC is already at the user premises, and therefore is difficult to calculate which is the percentage of adoptions over the total of downloads (and Linux distributions, and covermounts CDs, and copies made from friends, and…).
Let’s have a Guinness, now, to celebrate.
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