A major consequence of this difference in licenses is that LibreOffice can borrow code from OpenOffice, while OpenOffice cannot borrow code from LibreOffice. To start with, OpenOffice uses the Apache License, while LibreOffice uses a dual LGPLv3/Mozilla Public License (MPL). Source: The Document FoundationĪlso from the start, OpenOffice faced challenges that LibreOffice did not. Certainly, from the beginning, LibreOffice and OpenOffice showed little love for one another.įigure 1: The family releases, as of October 2020. Go-oo had been contentious in because it advocated a faster pace of development, so the creation of the two new projects seems to have formalized a division that already existed. 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. In fact, OpenOffice claims to be the legal descendant of because in 2011 Sun passed to Oracle which in turn passed it on to the Apache Foundation – but the concept of ownership has little relevance in open source. Both originate in, a project run by Sun Microsystems from 2000-2011. To pretend otherwise is a distortion of the truth.Īs you might know, the two office suites share a common history (Figure 1). However, by every possible standard, LibreOffice outshines OpenOffice and shows OpenOffice to be outdated. Even more importantly, many comparisons strive for a false sense of objectivity by declaring that any differences are minor. Many offer only a superficial glimpse at either office suite from the viewpoint of an unsophisticated and undemanding user.

However, what is surprising is how shallow many of those comparisons are. That number comes as no surprise, given that LibreOffice and OpenOffice are the best-known open source office suites and share a common past. A search for comparisons of LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice returns over 8.3 million results.

Compare apache openoffice libre office