lustratus LiteBytes

I have just read…

…a rather startling claim ( from Simon Phipps of Sun that they have ‘shipped’ 70 million copies of OpenOffice.org with another 30 million copies coming from other sources – with the clear implication that 100m copies is in some way equivalent to a number of users approaching 100m. Taken at its simplest level, 100m users puts them at 20% of the office productivity suite business (as Microsoft claims 400 million users). Given that Microsoft got $11b in revenue from Office in 2005, does this mean that OpenOffice.org is taking away a whopping $1b+ of revenue from Microsoft- assuming that 50% of the OpenOffice users would have bought Microsoft Office otherwise.

Should Microsoft be quaking in its boots? While I have certainly heard good reports from some about Open Office, this seems to be a great example of how Open Source marketing can bend the normal rules of the software industry to the point where it is hard to figure out what the real story is. When Mr Phipps says that there are 100,000,000 copies of Open Office “out there”, he almost certainly means that 100,000,000 copies were downloaded or shipped on CDs. This is like a software company sticking an evaluation copy on the front of Dr Dobbs or BYTE and then claiming every reader as a customer. What matters of course is the number of actual sites using the product (and hence actually “investing” in it).   It would therefore be reasonable to suggest that the actual market is a very small fraction of this and I would suspect that Sun has its own estimate of the actual market which it is choosing not to disclose for its own commercial reasons.

While it may be an easy shot to take at Sun and OpenOffice, the same problem pervades so much of the Open Source landscape. 10,000 downloads doesn’t mean anything if 9,990 were by students! To be serious for a moment, when evaluating Open Source for enterprise use you need to be very aware that the same rules do not apply as apply for vendor controlled software: For instance, reference sites may not carry the same weight as they are sometimes too close to the project and hence have their own intellectual pride and even careers are closely tied up in its success. In the worst case, what you thought was a reference site is closer to a sales pitch as the independent customer is in fact the primary author and sponsor of the project!

Before anybody takes from this that I am in any way anti-Open Source, I am not.  However, any Open Source project from Open Office down does need to be evaluated using a different set of rules from traditional pay-for software.

Ronan