It looks like LibreOffice is really popular

Jan 4, 2016 14:21 GMT  ·  By

The Document Foundation has revealed some really interesting LibreOffice numbers that show just how much popularity the office suite has and just how big the project really is.

We hear that LibreOffice is used by millions of users and that it’s been downloaded millions of times, but we haven’t actually gotten some specific data, at least until now. The Document Foundation has published pretty much everything they have on this matter, and it is actually much more impressive than you can imagine.

LibreOffice has been slowly growing since its initial launch after it was forked from OpenOffice.org. It didn’t take long for regular and enterprise users to switch to the new office suite, with good reason. The new version is lighter, faster, and much better maintained. It turns out that the project is bigger than most people realize and it has a huge reach.

LibreOffice for the masses

One of the most important aspects of LibreOffice is that it’s open source and free, which means that it’s available for anyone who wants to get it.

“Downloads since September 2010 are close to 120 million, with a rather steady increase of weekly numbers. In 2013, there have been visible spikes after the launch of LibreOffice 4.0 and 4.1, as these versions were representing a significant growth in term of features over previous releases. Unique IPs pinging for updates are around 150 million since 2012 (when we have started counting them),” said Italo Vignoli, who’s responsible for Marketing & PR on behalf of The Document Foundation.

It’s also impressive to see that more than a total of 1,000 developers have contributed to LibreOffice over time, making this one of the biggest collaborative open source projects on the planet.

From the looks of it, LibreOffice is following a constantly growing trend and it’s not showing any signs that it is slowing down. In a couple more years, it’s going to be fighting head to head with other proprietary applications, like Microsoft Office.