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The other day I received an email from one of our very interesting readers, asking me about the differences between OpenOffice and LibreOffice. I thought the topic could be of interest, so I decided to share the answer. |
LibreOffice was born in September 2010, when many of the OpenOffice developers quit their jobs when Sun was bought by Oracle. By then OpenOffice was the standard in open source office suites and therefore had a broad user base. In addition, it was a strong opponent to the Microsoft suite.
A year later, in June 2011, Oracle donated the OpenOffice project to the Apache Software Foundation and is now growing under it. Meanwhile, LibreOffice was considered to be a simple community clone of OpenOffice.
However, the differences between the two projects would go beyond the organizational aspect. Engineer Michael Meeks, LibreOffice developer at Novell, analyzed the code from LibreOffice and compared it to the one from the OpenOffice.org suite, which can be downloaded from the Apache Software Foundation, and found significant disparities.
Specifically, he found that LibreOffice developers have removed 526.000 lines of OpenOffice.org code and added a total of 290.000 new lines, including filters for Lotus Word Pro, enhancements to VBA, and a new filter for the RTF format.
The code that has been dropped refers to more than 100 import and export filters that have been deprecated, along with code for the OS / 2 operating system or for connecting to the proprietary Adabas database.
These differences in the code base between the two programs will certainly be an obstacle to the exchange of new code between both organizations.
Finally, it should be remembered that most Linux distributions have switched to LibreOffice despite the fact that OpenOffice.org is behind Oracle and the Apache Software Foundation.