Did you know that 55% of statistics are made up on the spot? (or maybe it was 68% I don't recall) If you have ever taken a statistics class you know that data is everything, but it's not just about the data itself.

What would you say if you heard that OpenOffice.org had an impressive 22% share of the market? It does, in Poland and the Czech Republic. ... The method used was to examine fonts installed on systems to identify various office suites.

Is it reasonable to raise the question "does X still matter?" when the X in question is in use among nearly two-thirds of the target users under discussion?

Black Duck Software recently published some summary statistics about free and open source software license adoption. Any of these conclusions might be reasonable if the 5% figure was meaningful, but Black Duck has given us no reason to believe it is; if anything, their own statements suggest it isn't.

Mozilla Firefox 3, the free and open source web browser, has finally overtaken Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and is getting closer and closer behind IE 7. According to data from StatCounter Global Stats, for the first time in February of this year, Firefox 3 with 24% market share overtook IE 6.

Some people want better statistics about how many GNU/Linux users there are. Some suggest a kind of phone-home function (horror!). A better approach would be to get deliberately counted. That is what counter.li.org is for.
The exact number will never be known and that is good.

From the official announcement on Monday 13th October at 09:00 UTC, to midnight on Sunday 20th October, OpenOffice.org 3.0 recorded an astonishing three million downloads via the Bouncer.