This is a semi-interesting story. Since I have space limited only by my lifespan, I'll tell the long version.
Years ago, there was an "office" suite, popular in Europe, known as StarOffice. You can read about StarOffice in Wikipedia. Version 1.0 ran on DOS and hit the streets in 1985. It had a nice GUI similar to what Apple developed for the Lisa (January 1983) and Macintosh (January 1984). This GUI ran on top of DOS. It had StarWriter, StarBase, and StarDraw. These had pretty basic features, but, then, it ran on DOS. You expected fast?
As an aside, Microsoft Word for DOS and Xenix (remember Microsoft's Unix version?) was released in October 1983. This version and four subsequent versions were not very popular - nor did it have a GUI, though it was a full-screen editor. On the other hand, WordStar was pretty popular. We used it on CP/M-80 (so kindly ported to our custom hardware by Steve Sidner). But the real powerhouse was WordPerfect. Alas, through screwups by Novell (who bought WordPerfect) as well as shenanigans by Microsoft, Word, then Office, became the dominant word processing suite. StarOffice focused on Europe and never had a big play in the US.
In 1995, StarOffice had StarWriter, StarCalc, StarDraw, StarImage, and StarChart - a pretty comprehensive set of programs each with many nice features. It ran on DOS, Windows 3.1, OS/2, Solaris SPARC, and Power Macintosh. In 1996 they added support for Linux. I bought a copy of StarOffice in 1997 when I kicked Microsoft out the door. StarOffice kept their GUI despite now running on multiple platforms, each with its own GUI. I think they might have done this because the individual programs were so tied to the GUI and perhaps, also, that it gave a common interface among all the platforms they supported.
Fast-forward to August 1999. Sun Microsystems bought Star Division
Corporation, makers of StarOffice. We used a lot of Sun equipment back then. It was a favorite of our customer (the Federal Government). The fighting between Sun and Microsoft was highly amusing. I especially liked (and agreed-with) Sun's evaluation of Microsoft and their crappy OS. The Sun v. Microsoft lawsuit was over Microsoft's implementation of Java. Microsoft had tried their famous and ubiquitous strategy of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. The Extend part, though, was a no-no. It was explicitly forbidden in the license. Eventually Microsoft gave Sun a huge chunk of money and the lawsuit went away.
Sun computed that the cost of the Star Division purchase and subsequent modifications would be (as I remember) $90 million - which was quite a lot back then. They also compared this number to what they were paying for Microsoft Office licenses and figured they would start saving money in just one year.
Sun attacked Microsoft any way they could - so long as it didn't cost them a lot. (Even then they had cash-flow problems.) It was a pretty slick maneuver when they provided StarOffice for free over the Internet. This, of course, bypassed the need for Windows and for Microsoft Office. StarOffice code was released as open source. Sun had always been a major contributer to open source (e.g., Java, MySQL, and lots of others). They named it OpenOffice and established an OpenOffice.org Web site. Sun had ditched the StarOffice GUI and released the individual programs (somewhat) independently. I migrated away from my StarOffice package to OpenOffice.
In 2009, Oracle bought Sun. No one likes Oracle. But they are efficient at making money - lots of it. No one trusts Oracle. Almost immediately after Oracle took over Sun, the open source developers and maintainers of OpenOffice left, took a copy of the software, and started LibreOffice. If you look around the LibreOffice Web site, you'll find a long list of companies and organizations that support LibreOffice - both financially and with labor. This turned out to be a good move for the software - Sun had been highly conservative about making changes to OpenOffice. The new LibreOffice organization wanted faster development and better maintenance. So LibreOffice quickly developed beyond what OpenOffice had been.
Oracle couldn't figure out how to make much money from OpenOffice so they gave the software to Apache, who now maintain it. Oracle could have given the code to the new LibreOffice organization, but didn't - I think out of spite. However, changes made to OpenOffice by the Apache developers are reviewed and sometimes incorporated into LibreOffice - and vice versa.
So LibreOffice and OpenOffice are quite similar. But you can probably find specific differences if you look. One thing that did happen almost immediately in LibreOffice was the great improvement in the compatibility between Microsoft Office formats and LibreOffice formats. There are probably a few problems left, but there won't be many.
Most people seem to be sticking with Microsoft Office for two reasons: FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), and loathing to learn anything new - even coping with minor differences in the way you run the programs. Plus, perhaps, the feeling that if you don't pay a lot for something, it isn't worth very much.
LibreOffice is a jewel. I use it daily. I like it. It works. It's free.
Roy
