Since then, both these suites have had contrasting fortunes. A year later, Oracle donated OpenOffice’s code and trademarks to the Apache Foundation who renamed it as Apache OpenOffice. The programmers who left the company formed the Document Foundation and forked OpenOffice’s code to create LibreOffice. Rumblings soon developed when Oracle threatened to pull the plug on OpenSource which eventually prompted many programmers to jump ship along with backers like Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical. In 2010, faced with financial difficulties, Sun was taken over by database software company, Oracle. Sun further developed the suite and open sourced it to rival the dominant player, MS Office. OpenOffice has its roots in StarOffice, a German program that Sun Microsystems acquired in 1999. Scroll back a few years to 2010, when was the only open source suite out there.

The dilemma arises when users realize that there is not much difference between the two as LibreOffice is the forked out version of OpenOffice. Companies which are in search of an open source office suite often find themselves in a dilemma of choosing between OpenOffice and LibreOffice. But, the same cannot be said for enterprises. When most people think of office suites, the only program that comes to mind is MS Office.

Openoffice review 2017