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MS Office 2013 Home/Business - non-transferable (1 PC p.person) - Caveat emptor.
techidave:
I didn't think that there was much difference between LibreOffice and OpenOffice... just two different companies doing it.
Carol Haynes:
LibreOffice is being developed with regular new releases ... plus it is totally open source.
OpenOffice is barely developed these days, rarely seeing new releases (even to fix bugs) and is Sun get their way the open source commitment will go down the crapper ... it is one of the main reasons LibreOffice spun off.
40hz:
Libre and Open share the same original roots.
But with version 3.5, major differences in the codebase came into play. As was reported earlier in The Register speaking to one of TDF's founders:
“We inherited a 15 years old code base, where features were not implemented and bugs were not solved in order to avoid creating problems, and this - with time - was the origin of a large technical debt,” says Caolán McNamara, a senior Red Hat developer who is one of TDF's founders and directors.
“We had two options: a conservative strategy, which would immediately please all users, leaving the code basically unchanged, and our more aggressive feature development and code renovation path, which has created some stability problems in the short term but is rapidly leading to a completely new and substantially improved free office suite: LibreOffice 3.5, the best free office suite ever.”
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Libre has since had major code rewrites and is now effectively its own thing. It's also not a company. It's run by the non-profit Document Foundation. It's a true F/OSS project licensed under the LGPLv3.
In many respects, The Document Foundation and LibreOffice shouldn't exist. As Carol mentions above, Libre reluctantly began its life as a fork of OpenOffice in response to Oracle attempting to assert ownership control over Sun's OpenOffice software following their acquisition of Sun.
LibreOffice is the future. OpenOffice will probably disappear within the next five or so years.
IainB:
Thanks. To avoid going down the rat-hole, I corrected the post to read: Increasingly Libre/OpenOffice and others are looking better by comparison, and of course the Google Docs alternative too
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40hz:
To avoid going down the rat-hole,...
-IainB (February 13, 2013, 07:25 PM)
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Agree. ;D
It's a topic that's been done to death in far too many places by now. For those who don't know whole Document Foundation/LibreOffice story - but are still interested in learning more - please feel free to search Google or head on over to Wikipedia for more.
8)
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