LibreOffice v OpenOffice

[bibblebub]

I have been quite happily using OpenOffice for sometime and have now downloaded LibreOffice just to have a look. It seems to be identical, but presumably there must be something to distinguish the two.

Is there any point to keeping both and, if not, which is the best bet for future enhancement?

[scotman]

According to Computer Active mag. LibreOffice(LO) has been developed by people who have left the Open Office team. It suggests that the two are currently very similar but says that LO also has the ability to embed standard fonts in PDF documents, a million-row spreadsheet, an improved printing interface and new fonts.

[ChuckFickens]

It's a fork in the development (trademark issues and a lot of the senior people didn't like Oracles plans for OO) and I'd say it's too early to tell which one is going to gain anything over the other. The big open source players are behind libra office, Oracle is behind open office so each has got a lot of good developers behind it.

It's a case of wait and see really.

[bibblebub]

Do you reckon that Oracle will keep OpenOffice free in the future, or will they see commercial opportunities somewhere down the line?

[ChuckFickens]

Personally I think openoffice will remain free as there is already a paid for version of it in what used to be called star office and is now called Oracle open office. The paid for version will probably start to get tight integration into Oracle's database backend products while the free version will be the development test bed for the overall product. If Oracle can get the paid for version of office working well with it's other products then they are starting to move out of their traditional market (massive enterprise scale databases) and gunning for the market that Microsoft currently dominates (smaller businesses)

[bibblebub]

Thanks for your replies Chuck.

It was a bit odd that during the installation on LibreOffice it takes one to a webpage saying "Thanks for using OpenOffice...", it must be that close to the forking point that they haven't got around to sorting out details like that yet.

[beso]

Libre Office claims to have sorted some of the bugs that continue to plague Open Office.

Either will continue to be a great option for casual or even half serious users but I don't see them ever making any significant impact on the Microsoft Office Suite for serious users.

For serious users the investment in the software is trivial compared to the investment in time spent doing the job and there is no doubting the superior productivity of MS Office, particularly for automation.

My advice. UNLESS you are not serious about productivity or don't value your effort, don't waste your time with Open Office or Libre Office and invest in MS Office.