But Opera doesn't know if the same person downloads a program to different machines at home and at work, and it doesn't distinguish between partial and completed downloads. "We estimate that the number of failed/partial downloads are low because we have a tiny application, which is easy to install," Odland said.
At up to 36M bytes, MySQL's database is considerably bigger but it too doesn't distinguish between completed and partial downloads, said MySQL spokesman Steve Curry, in an e-mail response to questions.
"But we take this in to consideration when reporting download numbers," he wrote. "For example, if there were 13 million download requests one year, we would conservatively report this as 'over 10 million downloads.'"
Totting up the figures is relatively easy. To get the Japanese figure, MySQL checked the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of the users hitting its server and counted up the .jp domains. Companies often write scripting programs to add up the totals.
The figures for ComPiere are supplied by SourceForge, which hosts its application downloads.
"As far as we know it is counted per IP address, per day, to prevent hiking up numbers," Janke wrote in an e-mail. "If they download the same file twice daily for a week, it would count 7 times (as far as I know)."
Software makers could provide more helpful numbers if they tracked installations and actual usage. A rewards program run by Google Inc.'s AdSense division suggests this is possible, at least for some programs. AdSense pays US$1 to referral Web sites every time a user clicks through a link that leads to Firefox being downloaded and used.
"They have a way of identifying when users installed it, and also when they actually used it," Netcraft's Mutton said.
In general, the proportion of downloads that lead to installation and usage is probably very small, he said.
"It could be as little as 10 percent of downloads are actually used," Mutton said, "although that's just my estimate."
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