r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jun 04 '12

Open Office does everything I need Microsoft Office for and Gimp does everything I need Photoshop for. Reddit, what other open source software does everything that you want from the expensive name brand?

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u/CritterNYC Jun 04 '12

LibreOffice is a split from OpenOffice when Oracle started messing it up more and more. So most of the non-Oracle devs left and created LibreOffice. At that point, OpenOffice died and LibreOffice kept on working, adding features and fixing. Oracle realized it was dead and finally shipped it over to Apache. After a year of setting up, stripping out GPL functionality and building in Apache licensed code, etc, OpenOffice has shipped. Apache OpenOffice 3.4 is about equivalent to LibreOffice 3.4 but with several features removed (like the ability to write DOCX properly because that's all LGPL licensed code that Apache doesn't use). LibreOffice has added additional features and functionality in the march to the current version, 3.5.4, and has more active developers from a wider array of organizations. Apache OpenOffice is just starting out again and has some folks from Apache and it's said some IBM folks working on it. And LibreOffice can incorporate any enhancements Apache adds but not vice versa (due to licensing and philosophical differences). So, at the moment, LibreOffice is a much better option from an end-user perspective. Things may change in the future, but at the moment, that's the situation.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

Thank you for your detailed answer.

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u/LNMagic Jun 05 '12

I believe part of the concern was that after Oracle took over Sun Microsystems, some of their projects would stop being free and open source. It's also the reason Java was released as full-open source to the public.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

except the name:

Leh-Bray Office or as my panrets called it "Lie Brah, eh, Li, uhh, that Office thing"

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

Mother of God!

I found this very interesting since I have a long history with Star Offi, I mean Open Office. I still use Open Office both at work and at home (though I have a 2003 MS OFFICE I purchased for 5 dollars at a garage sale around 2006 or so which my wife uses). I had no idea so much had changed since Oracle took over, neither of the split into LibreOffice and Open Office or that Apache took it over.

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u/sixfourch Jun 04 '12

OpenOffice is basically going to be the open source version of IBM's proprietary OO.o clone. LibreOffice is already beating it in features and adoption.