Being a little late to the scene, I installed Ubuntu 11.10 today, only to see it include something called LibreOffice. The whole thing smacked of OpenOffice, and I figured it was highly unlikely someone just whipped up a new office suite in record time, so that lead me to investigate OpenOffice’s whereabouts, and it didn’t look good. Finding themselves a little too close the corporate might of Oracle, a few of the core developers of OpenOffice split off to form another organization which forked ‘LibreOffice’. OpenOffice found itself in the hands of the Apache Software Foundation (good folks, but what do they want with an entire Office suite!?), and as a result, it’s been shelved.

LibreOffice promptly found its way into Ubuntu, OpenSuSE and various other distributions, and before you know it - a project has completely forked. Trying out LibreOffice is pleasant, and it basically is the same code underneath. This wouldn’t be the first time the project suddenly shifted (remember StarOffice?), but it doesn’t really help the software image when companies are just starting to come round to the ODF way of things. Either way, our new open Office suite is quite tasty, works well and does OpenOffice proud :)

	Posted November 16, 2011
	Written by John Payne