LibreOffice--Meet the New Office, Same as the Old Office?

I've recently made the jump from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice. Okay, it's not much of a jump. At this point, it's essentially the same software with a different name. What's important is what's to come in the future.

For those who don't know, LibreOffice was launched last fall when a group of leading OpenOffice.org developers, dissatisfied with Oracle's management of the open source productivity package, decided to jump ship and form their own fork of the software under the banner of The Document Foundation (TDF). Almost immediately, they released a "beta" of LibreOffice, which was little more than a re-branded version of OpenOffice. Likewise, they released a stable version (3.3) at almost the same time OOo 3.3 came out. The beta and initial 3.3 version of LibreOffice even used the same icons as OOo. Version 3.3.1, which came out a week after 3.3.0, had a few stability enhancements and a new set of icons.

So what's the difference? Why would one want to switch from OOo to LibreOffice? To the end user, the differences are indeed subtle and some of them will likely become more apparent as time goes on. LibreOffice developers claim to be cleaning up the source code to remove bits that are no longer needed and are incorporating other third party enhancements, including those found in Novell's Go.oo fork.

The main difference, however, is political. LibreOffice touts its independence from corporate interests as a formula for greater flexibility in determining the priorities and direction for development of the software. This promise has led several key players, including Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu Linux, to replace OpenOffice with LibreOffice in upcoming versions of its distribution. The degree to which LibreOffice has been embraced can be seen in a recent campaign to raise 50,000 Euros to allow TDF to incorporate as a legal entity in Germany. The campaign was expected to take a month to reach its goal, but they surpassed it in eight days and contributions, many from end users, are still coming in.

As time goes on, it will be interesting to see where TDF takes LibreOffice. It is entirely possible that it will completely break off from OOo as IBM did when it forked OOo 1.x to create Lotus Symphony, which now develops independently of OOo.

They say competition can be good for innovation, and hopefully this is the case with OOo and LibreOffice.