Indeed, Christian Schaller, a software engineering manager at Red Hat, recently wrote An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team to suggest that they “re-direct people who go to the website to the LibreOffice website instead.” But then IBM pulled out as well, giving its Symphony code to Apache.Īpache looks determined to continue the development of Apache OpenOffice, but without Sun, Oracle or IBM programmers, and without the sort of community support that powers LibreOffice, it’s hard to see the point.

LibreOffice is being developed under two “copyleft” licences: GNU’s LGPLv3 and the Mozilla Public License (MPLv2). “Copyleft” licences try to ensure that the code contributed by open source programmers can only be re-used on the same terms.

However, OpenOffice has changed from a “copyleft” (GPL) licence to a permissive Apache license, which means anybody can use the code for commercial purposes. Not everybody wants to write free code for somebody else’s benefit. The difference in licences puts Apache OpenOffice at a disadvantage. It means that LibreOffice can take code from Apache OpenOffice (that’s the point of permissive licences) but Apache OpenOffice can’t take code from LibreOffice (that’s the point of “copyleft” license)s. (In fact, both versions got it from the same source: IBM’s Symphony.) Indeed, Apache has had to replace OpenOffice code that was copyleft-only, but when it introduced a big new sidebar, LibreOffice was able to incorporate it immediately. Since LibreOffice seems to have many more active programmers, and since Apache’s programmers are inevitably contributing to LibreOffice, I don’t see how Apache OpenOffice can keep up. LibreOffice is now the default office suite in the majority of Linux distributions, and it’s aiming to release two versions a year, to match Ubuntu. Apache OpenOffice has no release schedule, but will release new versions when they are ready. This should mean that LibreOffice develops faster and attracts more users, which will attract more programmers. LibreOffice also seems to have more of a customer focus: just compare the two websites.

LibreOffice is trying to look slick and professional, and to attract users by providing a more polished product.

Both organisations have obviously had to spent a lot of time trying to make OpenOffice’s code smaller, less buggy and less crashy.

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