Microsoft and Apple have PR people and marketing budgets to get the word out about new software, but open-source projects, for the most part, don’t. They rely mostly on word of mouth (or blog) promotion. Apparently, at least for OpenOffice and Firefox, this works.

As many people already know, in the first 24 hours of Firefox 3’s release, there were over 8 million downloads. More recently, and without any special event, OpenOffice 3.0 got 3 million downloads in the first week. Perhaps people just really like the number 3.0, but I think there is something going on here: people are really getting  excited about these major new versions, even outside of the open-source software community.

As I mentioned before, there are no PR companies or advertisements to promote the launch of Firefox 3. People learn about it largely through news articles and word of mouth. This would be expected within the Linux community, but to get 3 million, or 8 million downloads, you need a lot of Windows and Mac users, in addition to the Linux users. So what these numbers really show is that the popular open-source applications are becoming mainstream enough for millions of people, using all the different operating systems, to go out and download them. This is definitely a good sign for open-source software.

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