Focusing largely on the increasing number of OpenOffice downloads, Sean Dodson writes in an article for The Guardian Open source apps are no small free beer that was the case concerning open source early on -- "free" meant users were free to do with open source software as they wished, in the view of Richard Stallman -- the more pressing meaning of free these days has very much to do with the cost of doing business. In support of his point, Dodson cites Gartner analyst Bianca Granetto, who says, "Open source has long been an open question, but the economic recession is making it a viable alternative."

While the province of open source has so far been largely the back-end world of servers and databases, Dodson writes, the day has dawned for those applications we pay Microsoft so much for, the desktop apps and operating systems to which open source now offers attractive and free alternatives.

Dodson notes that, since mid-October, "OpenOffice has been downloaded more than 42m times. That's roughly four times (3.75) every second. Or, put another way, that's 13,500 times every hour, 324,000 every day, that someone, somewhere in the world has chosen to download software for free, rather than pay for a software application that costs."

One convert is Chris Waite, the IT director of Travel Republic, a large online travel agent based in Kingston upon Thames, who says, "We chose it because of cost. The cost of the Microsoft Office suite is prohibitive, so we chose Open­Office and it does everything we need," he says. "It's saved us about £18,000. I just wish we'd deployed more open source software from the outset."

Dodson points out that there is scarcely any paid-for application that lacks a serious free or open source alternative, each growing in sophistication and putting pressure on the "proprietary" market leader, adding that market share for Microsoft Office appears to have declined from 95% of the market three years ago to something like 90% currently.

Microsoft acknowledges it has been forced to make "lots of fantastic offers available" to preserve its position, Dodson writes, but insists its Office business remains "incredibly healthy". Nicholas McGrath, director of platform strategy at Microsoft UK, admits that open source software "continues to challenge Microsoft to ensure that they are listening to customers, providing products that are easy-to-use and have great support behind them … if we don't continue to innovate then we are going to be challenged".

The switch to open source is really evident, Dodson contends in the public sector where Microsoft is increasingly challenged. "The idea of using open source software not originated by an American multinational corporation seems to go down particularly well in the French public service," says John McCreesh, marketing project lead of OpenOffice.org. Surprisingly, Dodson notes, OpenOffice is surprisingly weak is where you may expect it to be strongest, in the developing world. "In those economies piracy is so rife we've made little impact," admits McCreesh. "One is free as in free, the other is free as in illegal."

Toting up the users of the latest version of OpenOffice and adding that number to previous versions and other variants such as Novell's Go-oo, takes the estimated user base of the software to something approaching 150 million worldwide, Dodson calculates. While Microsoft Office has at least 10 times as many, McCreesh says that many companies are considering the open option when it's time to upgrade. "It's interesting that Microsoft are slipping the release date of their next version of Office," he says. "They're not stupid. They know that as soon as people are faced with upgrade costs they'll start looking at the competition."

Complaints that used to be raised concerning the quality and sophistication of open source solutions have little currency these days, Dodson points out. Gimp, for example, has for years been dogged by criticism that it was unworkable. But volunteer developers have worked to overcome its limitations. "There are problems with open source just as there are with proprietary projects," says Michael J. Hammel, an author of several Gimp textbooks, who observes, "... with open source there is more transparency and a chance to fix ... problems. It's a matter of when the world will realize that sharing ideas instead of selling them is a better long-term solution."

Dodson concludes his piece with the view of Michael Meeks, an engineer at Novell, who says, "The traditional model of software development is falling apart at the seams. We see the long timelines and bad project management endemic of propriety software being frequently disastrous. The open source development model has a huge number of attractions, particularly getting code out early. People will switch increasingly to that model."

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