OpenOffice Leading Open Source Adoption

By Greg McNevin

October 8, 2008: With the latest release candidate out for OpenOffice 3, the open source office suite is picking up steam, and along with Firefox, it is proving to be far and away the most popular piece of open source software out there.

While it is yet to really face down Microsoft Office in some countries, in others the suite is proving to be wildly popular (no doubt due to the price). For example, in Italy OpenOffice has just passed four million downloads in 12 months, while Brazil has notched up 12 million users – a full 25 percent of the office market.

According to a recent release by the Open Source Census (OSC), open source adoption in Europe is outpacing that of the US, with OpenOffice found on 45 percent of Linux and Windows machines.

73 percent of home PC scanned have it installed, while 28 percent of enterprise machines do. And as one would expect the instance of open source software is higher on Linux machines than Windows, with 39 open source software packages found on average on each machine and 87 on each Linux machine.

Launched by OpenLogic six months ago, the census’ figures may not be watertight, but they do give insight into the rapidly growing enthusiasm for OpenOffice.

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