OpenOffice.org is one of the main competitors to Microsoft Office suite of Office productivity applications. Originally developed as StarOffice in the 1990s, the suite had managed in recent years by Sun Microsystems as an open source project. But when Oracle acquired Sun in April 2009, the future of Sun's software offerings--especially free like OpenOffice.org--has been called into question. Long before the start, the leading developer of OpenOffice.org, unhappy with the status quo in Oracle, defecting spy from the project.
The result was LibreOffice, a new fork of the code of OpenOffice.org base which is maintained by a non-profit organization called the foundation document. LibreOffice looks like OpenOffice.org, and works like OpenOffice.org. Also reads and writes OpenDocument file format of OpenOffice.org. The difference is that LibreOffice was developed fully based on the Community, without supervision by Oracle. (The "libre" in the name of the suite is derived from a root meaning "freedom erudite.")
[Also on InfoWorld: "10 great free desktop productivity tools that aren't OpenOffice.org" | Track the latest trends in open source with open sources blog and InfoWorld Technology: Open Source newsletter. ]
The question is, which suite should you use? OpenOffice.org is LibreOffice recently announced version 3.3.0 of their goods. Both are available as free download (although Oracle also sells a version of OpenOffice.org which includes commercial support). What will be the best bet for now or in the near future? I installed both to discover.
installation and Language SupportOpenOffice.org and LibreOffice each consists of six questions, called Writer, Calc, Impress, Base, Draw and math in both suites. The modules provide word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphic design business, database management and amending formula, respectively.
Both suites are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X (Intel and PowerPC). You can also get OpenOffice.org for Solaris (Sparc and Intel). Because I wanted to test the most typical scenario for Office-replacement, however, I ran both suites on a Intel PC running Windows 7.
Executable installers for both suites are similar; They ask the same questions and the installation scripts seem identical, even if the installation of LibreOffice is a bit slow. I chose to install typical for both.
LibreOffice has support for a wide range of languages than OpenOffice.org.
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