Twenty years ago, Sun released OpenOffice for the first time and laid the foundation for the success of the open source package. The Apache Foundation – the current rights holder – also congratulates itself and celebrates that the software is still free in both respects. Raise your cups, long live freedom!

An open letter in the family feud Congratulations from the Document Foundation, known for LibreOffice, which is also free, are likely to be less welcome. Although OpenOffice used to be a great package and changed the world, users would end up losing out if they didn’t know about a newer project or if one brand was better known than the other.

Yes the authors do not explicitly state this, but the implied reproach is that OpenOffice only lives from the fame of old days. In a way, LibreOffice is actually the younger alternative with a different name – the project only saw the light of day 2010. However, the story here is a bit more complicated than the average fork in the open source world.

Originally 1985 started as the proprietary StarWriter, the software changed hands for the first time 1999 with the takeover of the developer by Sun Microsystems. Its intention was the internal use of what is now called StarOffice. The release as OpenOffice.org or OOo for short followed a year later, StarOffice lived on enriched with proprietary elements on its basis.

A free office that was well received In the following decade, OOo was able to win over an extensive community of developers and users. But after Sun changed hands in the year 2010 and Oracle no longer seemed interested in the package, the majority of the community split off and founded the Document Foundation.

However, Oracle kept the rights to the name and so the alternative software suite appeared in January 2011 for the first time under the name LibreOffice. Right from the start, however, the project explicitly saw itself as the legitimate successor to OOo. Oracle itself handed OpenOffice over in April 2011 to the Apache Foundation, which has been maintaining it since then as Apache OpenOffice.

How well this happens, however, remains to be seen Debate. The Document Foundation points out, for example, that there has been no major release since 2014. This refers to version 4.1.0, the latest 4.1.7 from the year 2019 is in fact a pure maintenance release. LibreOffice has now reached the seventh major release and could claim the same birthday due to the code base and its origin.

Don’t look for OpenOffice, we are better According to its own information, the project can be with whole 15. 000 Commits boast that OpenOffice just comes up 595. Nevertheless, the Document Foundation does not seem to be satisfied, because it