(TheForceField.net ) October 20, 2008 — The OpenOffice.org Community reported that OpenOffice.org 3.0 reached 3 million downloads after the first week. The latest version of OpenOffice was launched October 13. OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the latest release of the open source office suite originally developed by Sun Microsystems and is considered by many to be one of few serious competitors of Microsoft Office.
The OpenOffice.org official web site went down during the launch last Monday. A download page was published around noon in lieu of the home page with the brief message "Apologies – our website is struggling to cope with the unprecedented demand for the new release 3.0 of OpenOffice.org. The technical teams are trying to come up with a solution".
A source at Sun was quoted as saying that the outage was due to a "large number of http requests bombarding the site". The high number of requests was believed to be attributed to a sudden increase in traffic in response to the official release of OpenOffice.org 3.0.
The downloads are currently being recorded at www.mealldubh.org, a blog owned and operated by John McCreesh, OpenOfffice.org Marketing Project Lead. The site records each download and compiles the numbers on a graph. However, the numbers may not be accurate. The site only records straight downloads from OpenOffice.org and the mirror sites. It does not track distribution via torrent or CD-ROM, two other popular methods of distribution.
McCreesh admits the numbers may be too low. "These logs are the only figures we are able to quantify accurately, but they are a considerable underestimate of the actual number of downloads", McCreesh wrote in his blog yesterday. "So how many people are already using OpenOffice.org 3.0? No-one knows."
Alex Fisher, OpenOffice.org CD-ROM Project Co-Lead, agreed. In an e-mail response to the news in the OpenOffice.org Marketing Project news list, Fisher wrote "Then of course, there's the Bit Torrent downloads, and people like me who go directly to a mirror (my ISP has a mirror of OO.o that is only accessible by their users)…. 3 million is probably conservative."
As of this morning, mealldubh.org reported at total of 3,009,832 downloads, a majority of them to computers running Microsof Windows. What impressed McCreesh was the number of Mac users downloading the product. The blog reported over 320,000 downloads by users of Mac OS X.
"This is a tribute not only to the developers who have created this great product, but to the tens of thousands of people in the community who have tested it, translated it, supported it, and told the world about it", McCreesh wrote in an e-mail to the Marketing Group. "A week of three million downloads – what a great start to 'the year of three'!"
The Office suite is released under the GNU/GPL and is freely available. OpenOffice.org v3.0 is currently available for download in English for Windows, Linux, OS X and OpenSolaris at http://www.openoffice.org .
