To my surprise, there were hundreds of line items.
#OPENOFFICE DOWNLOAD 2019 CODE#
In other words, LibreOffice is close to one quarter larger, despite the fact that it has removed redundancies in the code and rewritten parts for greater efficiency, operations that OpenOffice has yet to duplicate.Ībout eight years ago, I saw a copy of a LibreOffice internal document that listed all the LibreOffice features that OpenOffice lacked. The difference can be seen in the download sizes: LibreOffice’s DEB download file is 195MB, while OpenOffice’s is 159MB. However, the differences do seem to be growing – mostly due to LibreOffice’s innovations. No doubt the mutual use of Open Document Format (ODF) for files continues to retain compatibility. Even today, enough code remains the same that extensions that run with one often run with the other releases, although less often than a decade ago. The Feature DisparityĪside from Go-oo’s contributions a decade ago, the two projects initially shared a common codebase. OpenOffice’s continued existence has been quixotic, even admirable, but the project is simply not structured to compete. Equally inevitably, LibreOffice has attracted important corporate supporters such as Red Hat and Collabora while OpenOffice has been unable to replace the void left by IBM eight years ago. And in 2019, LibreOffice had 15,000 code commits, while OpenOffice had 595.
In comparison, during that time, LibreOffice has had 13 major releases and 87 minor releases. The result is predictable: OpenOffice has not had a major release since 2014 and only 11 minor ones. Since then, OpenOffice has been reluctant to publish the number of contributors, but considering that OpenOffice claimed 120 in November 2012, it is doubtful that the number today is more than a small fraction of LibreOffice’s 1,722. Just as importantly, from late March 2014 to March 2015, OpenOffice had a total of 16 contributors, 12 of whom stopped contributing when IBM stopped supporting OpenOffice. A major consequence of this difference in licenses is that LibreOffice can borrow code from OpenOffice, while OpenOffice cannot borrow code from LibreOffice.
#OPENOFFICE DOWNLOAD 2019 LICENSE#
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.
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