Free office suite 20 years old - October 13, 2000, Sun Microsystems opened under a free license the source code for the StarOffice office suite, which was created in the early 90s of the last century by Star Division. In 1999, Star Division was acquired by Sun Microsystems Corporation, which took one of the most important steps in the history of open source software - it moved StarOffice into the category of free projects. In 2010 Oracle OpenOffice in their own hands along with other Sun Microsystems projects, but after a year of trying to develop OpenOffice.org on their own project in the hands of the Apache Foundation.
The latest patch release of Apache OpenOffice 4.1.7 was a year ago, and significant releases have not been released for 6 years. The initiative to develop a free office suite was intercepted by the LibreOffice project, which was created in 2010 due to dissatisfaction with the tight control of the development of OpenOffice.org by Oracle, which prevents interested companies from connecting to the joint work.
LibreOffice Developers an open letter in which they called on Apache OpenOffice developers to work together, since Apache OpenOffice has long been in deep stagnation, and all development in recent years has been concentrated in LibreOffice. Compared to OpenOffice in LibreOffice features such as OOXML (.docx, .xlsx) and EPUB export, digital signing of documents, significant Calc performance optimizations, a redesigned NotebookBar interface, Pivot Charts, watermarks, and Safe Mode.
Despite stagnation and virtual lack of support, the position of the OpenOffice brand remains strong and the number of downloads is still , and many users are unaware of the existence of LibreOffice. The LibreOffice developers have invited the OpenOffice project to bring to the attention of its users the existence of an actively maintained and more functional product that continues the development of OpenOffice and includes new features that modern users need.
Source: opennet.ru