One! million! downloads! ( ... more or less)

Has one in every 100 people in Japan downloaded MySQL AB's database? Figures published by the company this week imply that's the case, but common sense suggests otherwise.

Software companies love to brag about download figures but in reality they can be misleading, analysts and some vendors said. Companies routinely include incomplete downloads in their total, even though the same user is likely to have tried again after an initial download failure, and hardly any vendors estimate how many people actually install and use their software.

"Obviously they want to make the numbers as high as possible, so I suspect most people choose the highest number without doing any filtering," said Paul Mutton, an Internet services developer at Netcraft Ltd., which measures software use on the Web.

Developers of free and open-source software have a particular penchant for the claims, in part because they don't have sales figures to measure use of their software. Several vendors at Solutions Linux in Paris this week said they had passed the hallowed milestone.

"Our software has been downloaded more than a million times," said Jorg Janke, founder and president of ERP (enterprise resource planning) company ComPiere Inc., in a common refrain.

Vendors don't promote the idea that downloads equals number of users, but they don't dispel it either. Mozilla Corp. reported in October that "adoption numbers have exceeded expectations with more than 100 million downloads since Firefox's introduction in 2004."

The prize for gratuitous marketing goes to Opera Software ASA, whose chief executive promised to swim from Norway to the U.S. last year if Opera's browser was downloaded a million times in four days. Predictably, Opera reached its target, and even more predictably its top executive did not swim the Atlantic. He faked an accident not far from Oslo.

MySQL's announcement this week was tied to the opening of a Japanese subsidiary. "In 2005, there were over one million downloads of the MySQL database server by Japanese users," the company said. (It also reported a million downloads for MySQL 5.0 in November.)

Japan has a population of 127 million, including 18 million under age 15. Allowing for tech-savvy infants -- not to mention people without computers -- that means almost 1 in every 100 people downloaded the software, if each download corresponded to an individual user.

It didn't, of course. The number of successful downloads is typically far lower, and the number of unique users who install and use the software is lower still, Netcraft's Mutton said.

"I've downloaded Firefox 10 or 20 times myself, to get different versions and to put it on different machines, so that's reduced the number of users by a factor of 20 right there. Plus there are people who use it for five minutes and give up," he noted.

Vendors don't pretend the figures are more than a rough guide to the popularity of their software, and they insist they take care to produce accurate figures. But what the numbers actually represent is unclear.

"There obviously is not a standard for this," said Opera spokesman Tor Odland.

To keep its numbers accurate, Opera only reports downloads from its own server network, not from sites like download.com, where it has less control over the numbers, Odland said.