When Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, the database giant got too but arguments over control of the project led to LibreOffice forking off, then to OpenOffice being spun off to the Apache Foundation. An enormously complex project, it’s had more than its fair share of troubles. was released on the world by Sun Microsystems back in 2001 when they open sourced the proprietary Star Office.

It’s not surprising they look similar – LibreOffice forked from just a couple of years ago. Because (nearly) everyone needs a word processor and spreadsheet, has long been one of the open source poster children to encourage take up – “Why pay $$$ for Microsoft Office when this is just as good and you can have it for free?”.Īt first glance, the two suites look very similar – so are there good reasons to choose one rather than the other? Pretty impressive, when many open standards haven’t had anything like the same success (how many people – even hard core Linux users – commonly spurn mp3 files for ogg vorbis?). Without, it’s fair to say that the OpenDocument format would never have stood a chance of becoming an open standard. One or other comes bundled with pretty much every Linux distro out there. Dropped indicates that while the office suite works, new versions are no longer being released for the indicated OS the number in parentheses is the last known stable version which was officially released for that OS.Although there are many others, and LibreOffice are the two 800lb gorrillas of the open source office suite world.Yes indicates that the office suite has been officially released in a fully functional, stable version.

Beta indicates that while a version of the office suite is fully functional and has been released, it is still in development (e.g.

Partial indicates that while the office suite works, it lacks important functionality compared to versions for other OSs it is still being developed however.

No indicates that it does not exist or was never released.

The operating systems the office suites were designed to run on without emulation for the given office suite/OS combination, there are five possibilities: Office Suite names that are on a light purple background are discontinued.

Libreoffice vs openoffice powerpoint