LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

A search for comparisons of LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice returns over 8.3 million results. That number comes as no surprise, given that LibreOffice and OpenOffice are the best-known open source office suites and share a common past. However, what is surprising is how shallow many of the comparisons are. Many offer only a superficial glimpse at either office suite from the viewpoint of an unsophisticated and undemanding user. Often, the comparisons are obsolete. Also important to note is that many comparisons strive for a false sense of objectivity by declaring that any differences are minor. However, by every possible standard, LibreOffice outshines OpenOffice and shows OpenOffice to be outdated. To pretend otherwise is a distortion of the truth.

As you might know, the two office suites share a common history (Figure 1). Both originate in OpenOffice.org, a project run by Sun Microsystems from 2000-2011. In fact, OpenOffice claims to be the legal descendant of OpenOffice.org because in 2011 Sun passed OpenOffice.org to Oracle, which in turn passed it on to the Apache Foundation – but the concept of ownership has little relevance in open source. At the same time, Go-oo, a semi-official fork that had operated quietly since 2007, created LibreOffice and its governing body, The Document Foundation. Go-oo had been contentious in OpenOffice.org because it advocated a faster pace of development, so the creation of the two new projects seemed to formalize a division that already existed. Certainly LibreOffice and OpenOffice showed little love for one another from the beginning.

Figure 1: The OpenOffice.org family releases, as of October 2020. Source: The Document Foundation

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