Apache OpenOffice Downloaded 50 Million Times In a Year

An anonymous reader writes with this quick bite from the H: "Just a few days after the one year anniversary of the release of the first version of OpenOffice from the Apache Foundation (Apache OpenOffice 3.4) on 8 May 2012, the project can now boast 50 million downloads of the Open Source office suite. 10 million of those downloads happened since the beginning of March. In contrast, LibreOffice claimed it had 15 million unique downloads of its office suite in all of 2012."

Comments

It is a shame that OpenOffice gets the nice name..

[duckgod]

and LibreOffice gets everything else. LibreOffice is such a better piece of software after all the hard work done since the fork. But sometimes even when talking to my techy friends I have to elaborate when I say I created the doc in "LibreOffice".

Bet that LibrOffice download count doesn't include

[Anonymous Coward]

downloads of all the distributions that use it.

Marketing

[MrEricSir]

LibreOffice is such a better piece of software after all the hard work done since the fork. But sometimes even when talking to my techy friends I have to elaborate when I say I created the doc in "LibreOffice".

^ So, so much this. Seems like only the geeks have figured out that LibreOffice exists, and these numbers only confirm my suspicions.

LibreOffice needs some kind of marketing push to get people to switch.

Re:Marketing

[Jane Q. Public]

"I prefer LibreOffice over OOo myself, but I prefer either one over the user-hostile ribbon interface of Microsoft Office where it has been turned into a game of hide-and-seek."

It's kind of ironic. Microsoft took much of Xerox PARC's human-computer interface research, and continued it for decades. Resulting in some VERY effective UI.

Then, inexplicably, they turned around and just threw most of it away, with the ribbon interface and then Windows 8.

To be fair, Microsoft has not been the only one lately to do "new" things that are actually quite old (tried many years ago and discarded for good reasons). Apple's recent "dumbing down" of their desktop UI to make it more like iOS is another, though less drastic, example.

You know the saying: those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat it. I only wish THEY would also the only ones who suffer because of it.

Re:Marketing

[TrollstonButterbeans]

LibreOffice is absolutely excellent. Except I think of the "Nacho Libre" movie and I can't see myself saying "Libre" in casual conversation and it sounds exceptionally geeky and not mainstream. Not as bad as "The Gimp" in the name department, but yes the name absolutely falls in the "not helpful department". Versus, say, Firefox which always had a good name or MYSQL was always a good name.

Good Job

[trifish]

OpenOffice is now proper open source as it is under Apache Foundation. There is absolutely no reason to maintain two branches of it now. It only dilutes the effort and weakens the well-known OpenOffice brand. You should end the fork before it does even more harm.

Re:Good Job

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice is now proper open source as it is under Apache Foundation. There is absolutely no reason to maintain two branches of it now. It only dilutes the effort and weakens the well-known OpenOffice brand. You should end the fork before it does even more harm.

Fine by me, end the OpenOffice fork and give LibreOffice the name. That is what Oracle should have done when they decided to hand OO over to someone else.

Re:unique vs total?

[thomasw_lrd]

Not to mention that Ubuntu has LibreOffice pre-installed, so none of those users have a reason to download LibreOffice. That could skew the download counts.

Re:It is a shame that OpenOffice gets the nice nam

[Samantha Wright]

Personally, I say "OpenOffice" anyway when I mean LibreOffice. It has more currency with less technical people and those who never update, and only occasionally does it prompt a concerned stare when someone actually knows the distinction. Maybe we could just go back to calling it StarOffice?

Re:It is a shame that OpenOffice gets the nice nam

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say the fact that e.g. IBM is making use of the code (and possibly/probably willing to contribute) and they probably don't like LibreOffice's license might be one of the main reasons for OO to still exist.

Re:It is a shame that OpenOffice gets the nice nam

[FreeUser]

What do you think LibreOffice should do to make its brand more recognizable?

I've been using LibreOffice for a number of years, and love it (having written two, and typeset three, books with it), but the name is a hindrence. When I speak to my wife and use the term LibreOffice her eyes glaze over, whereas Open Office has a natural name people understand.

Free Office would have been better than LibreOffice, or any of a dozen other names I can think of (Community Office, OpenSource Office, New Office, World Office, even abbbreviating it to L-Office ...anything like that would lead to far better name recognition).

That said, LibreOffice is great, and I wouldn't necessarily spend too much energy trying to get agreement to change the name at this late date (well, maybe the abbreviated "L-Office"). You've all done fine work...now the word needs to get out.

I also find the stats suspicious...Gentoo folks like me are probably counted in the stat as downloads occur on an emerge, but how many copies of Fedora, Scientific, CentOS, RHEL, etc. have shipped with LibreOffice and aren't counted?