Today is a special day for one of the best known open Source office suites and that is October 13, 2000(this is more precisely the date of publication of the source code) OpenOffice.org was born which is a project at the initiative of Sun Microsystems with a view to producing a free and open source office suite based on StarOffice.
The resulting product is distributed under the same name and under various licenses (the LGPL and, up to version 2.0 beta 2 included, the SISSL), and works on various platforms including Windows, many Unix: Linux, Solaris or Apple Mac OS X.
The stated goal is to offer an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary office suite Office in which OpenOffice will have a significant market share.
Since version 3.0.0, the software has changed from the GNU LGPL 2.1 license to the GNU LGPL 3 license. As of version 3.2.1, Oracle is developing OpenOffice.org, following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle.
In April 2011, Oracle announced its withdrawal from the OpenOffice.org project. Soon after, Oracle turned the project over to the Apache Foundation and OpenOffice.org joined the Apache project incubator.
The latest version of the office suite released with the name OpenOffice.org es 3.3.0 was released on January 26, 2011. The following versions were released under the name Apache OpenOffice for the Apache branch and LibreOffice for the The Document Foundation branch.
In fact, the original project was divided into two branches:
The version of Oracle which then he transferred his rights and the name OpenOffice.org to the Apache Foundation. Members of the Apache Foundation, wanting the word Apache to appear, changed the name of the project and the product to Apache OpenOffice;
The community branch supported by The Document Foundation which continues to distribute the LibreOffice suite
Today, therefore, OpenOffice.org celebrates its XNUMXth anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, the board of directors of The Document Foundation, behind the development of LibreOffice (which recently celebrated its XNUMXth anniversary), asked Apache Office to join the LibreOffice adventure.
They point out, among other things, that for six years, OpenOffice has not produced any major version, content with minor versions to correct certain problems. Comparatively, during the same period, LibreOffice offered 13 major and 87 minor versions.
Additionally, in 2019 LibreOffice received more than 15,000 commits, compared to 595 against OpenOffice.
The latest major version of LibreOffice, Libre Office 7.0, dates from early august and it comes with a number of key changes and enhancements, including greatly improved compatibility with the Microsoft suite. The performance improvements come from the Vulkan GPU-based acceleration landing in LibreOffice after passing the Cairo code to Google's Skia library.
“Additionally, LibreOffice has also integrated many essential features for end users in 2020:
Export to Microsoft Office OOXML formats (.docx, .xlsx, etc.)
ODF, OOXML and PDF signature for added security
Major performance improvements in Calc, the spreadsheet
A new NotebookBar user interface
…and much more“But still, many users don't know that LibreOffice exists. The OpenOffice brand is as strong as ever, even though the software has not had a significant release in over six years and is hardly developed or supported.
“If Apache OpenOffice wants to keep its old 4.1 branch from 2014, of course that's important for old users. But the most responsible thing we can do in 2020 is: help new users. Let them know that there is a much more modern, updated and professionally supported suite based on OpenOffice with many additional features that people need.
“We ask Apache OpenOffice to do the right thing. Our goal should be to make powerful, up-to-date and well-maintained productivity tools available to as many people as possible. Let's work on this together! "
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about the open letter from LibreOffice to OpenOffice, you can consult the details In the following link.