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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Are you kidding? by meekg · 2013-02-12 06:01 · Score: 1, Troll

If was to cost even $10, what would the download rate be?
Try anything that's currently free on the internet, add a small charge, and watch the DL rate plummet.
OO is only acceptable since it is free. If someone was making money off of it, then they'd be expectations for things a bug fixes and support and in no time it will cost $150, and get a bad rap in comparison with some other free product.