There are two astonishing statistics in the latest OpenOffice.org newsletter.
- The first is that nearly 25m downloads of the software have been reported. 24,800,000 — that’s a lot of 60mb downloads, and the rate is climbing steadily.
- The second is that while millions of people have tried the software — and it’s a reasonable assumption that many are still using it — hardly anyone has hacked on it at all. Let’s be more precise. 358 people have signed the agreement that allows their changes to be redistributed. That means about 1 in 80,000 users, or 0.0015 per cent.
- About 15,000 have signed up for the mailing lists. You wouldn’t do that unless you needed help (I’m tempted to add ‘professional help’). So, mostly, it works without too much explanation.
Put all these statistics together, and they say that software is widely attractive when it behaves as if it were commercial, and doesn’t demand interest or ideological commitment from its users. But we knew that already, so it must be true.