Disclaimer: This is just opinion and doesn't in any way represent site policy with regard to either project. As with KDE and Gnome projects, choice is good.

So Oracle has donated OpenOffice to the Apache foundation and at least one IBM employee has announced support for it. This has of course been discussed here on the site and elsewhere at length.

My vote goes for LibreOffice. Although I'm still using old OpenOffice Portable on Windows until the directory structure issue gets cleared up, I don't think that will take long.

• So far the updates and improvements coming from LibreOffice have been encouraging that they can really improve the pace of an open productivity suite.
• Have more faith in the LGPL license to protect users in the long term.
• The variety and number of organizations behind LibreOffice is very encouraging, including Google, Novell, Canonical, FSF. Its already the default suite for the major Linux distros and has many features OO doesn't (source).

Thoughts?

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I don't want to support LGPL when there's Apache 2 license for practically the same program, so I'm for Open Office. Also, there's IBM, Apache and (still) Oracle behind it.

Please, be serious. They listed 4 'features' including a change of a button to a combo box. For any real use they are equivalent ATM.

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What about better file format support?

• OpenXML export
• Microsoft Works import
• WordPerfect graphics
• Excel VBA macros
• embedded Visio diagrams
• embedded multimedia on Linux

Support for all that was implemented and submitted to Oracle before LibreOffice was founded, but Oracle refused to merge the patches to OpenOffice.org.

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In the long run, OpenOffice.org seems to be unable to compete against LibreOffice. The Apache license is compatible with both MPL and LGPL, but not the other way around. That is, the OOo developers have to implement new features themselves, while the LibreOffice developers can simply copy-paste code at will.

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Good points.


Although IBM has been a strong contributor to open projects, the only productivity software I've used made by IBM in the last 5 years is the nightmarish Lotus Email so I'm cynical to the idea they will add anything worthwhile. Additionally, everything I've seen from Oracle in the past year indicates they'll have little to do with OO after donating. That said, Apache is a cool organization and I have no doubt that if some of the developers get behind it, they'll do something great.

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Some news:

1. Novell ...

• is offering enterprise support for LibreOffice
• has walked away from its version of OpenOffice
  
  http://www.novell.com/products/libreoffice/

2. The 3.5.5 version lists a clear interest in the enterprise space:

"This release fixes a number of bugs and further improves the stability of the software, making it the best version available for corporate and enterprise adoption. Among the changes are improvements in Calc, Impress, in the handling of fonts as well as enhancements with regards to importing and exporting third-party formats." (source)

That likely won't mean much initially but if only a few major companies switch to LibreOffice, that could guarantee continued improvements activity over the next few years. This really could become the Linux of productivity applications.

3. Some new security features (although the old ones were far from poor security) also put the program in line with some recent OpenOffice updates (source)

4. Cool article on what's coming up.

5. PortableApps has made this version available on their site.

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Supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation | DuckDuckGo user | My GPG key | Projects donated to: VLC, CubicExplorer, Ditto, Greenshot, TrueCrypt

Cool...