OpenOffice: Worth $21 Million Per Day, If It Were Microsoft Office

Posted by timothy on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @05:53AM from the imaginary-markets dept.

rbowen of SourceForge writes with an interesting way to look at the value of certain free software options: "Apache OpenOffice 3.4.1 has averaged 138,928 downloads per day. That is an average value to the public of $21 million per day, as calculated by savings over buying the competing product. Or $7.61 billion (7.61 thousand million) per year." (That works out to about $150 per copy of MS Office. There are some holes in the argument, but it holds true for everyone who but for a free office suite would have paid that much for Microsoft's. The numbers are even bigger if you toss in LibreOffice, too.)

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Re:potentially worth... by akpoff · 2013-02-12 06:42 · Score: 5, Informative

The summary also notes this is savings to the end user. If I don't need all the features found in MS Office I shouldn't need to buy it. If I get what I need and pay $0 I've saved $150.
That's the whole point of the summary. Some segment of the public are getting what they need to get their "office productivity" tasks done for less cost.