An office suite is part of the standard package on any workstation. When you install Linux on a desktop computer, the free LibreOffice is usually installed on your mass storage device at the same time. But the ubiquitous LibreOffice package is not to everyone's taste. The LibreOffice package has put on some weight over the years and can be sluggish even on state-of-the-art hardware. And the suite sometimes causes errors with complex documents in Microsoft Office Open XML formats, which makes it difficult to work across platforms. Linux is all about choice, so this seemed like a good time to consider the alternatives.

Apache OpenOffice

The origins of OpenOffice [1] go back to the year 1984, when Marco Börries, a student from Lüneburg, Germany, developed the StarWriter word processing program for CP/M. StarWriter was later ported to the 16-bit DOS operating system and expanded to create a full-fledged office suite called StarOffice. Sun Microsystems acquired StarOffice and released OpenOffice.org as an open source version of the StarOffice suite. After an eventful history involving Sun and Oracle, the project ended up with the nonprofit Apache Software Foundation in 2011.

In the meantime, however, Oracle's licensing policy alienated many developers, and they created LibreOffice, an offspring free of corporate interests, which led to OpenOffice being increasingly sidelined. As a result, the two projects grew apart, with OpenOffice receiving far fewer updates, usually limited to bug fixes, due to a lack of active developers.

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