I switched from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice a few years ago. Apart from the cost, I was frustrated in getting macros to do what I wanted. When I found out about the LibreOffice development, I decided to ignore it. Now I am told that LibreOffice is better. I have invested a lot of time in becoming familiar with OpenOffice Basic. Should I switch to Libre or is it time to go back to Microsoft? I like Windows 10 and have a Windows phone. Ian

LibreOffice is a forked version of OpenOffice. The two suites are still very close, and LibreOffice includes OpenOffice Basic. However, I expect them to diverge, because Apache OpenOffice will not be able to keep up with the speed of LibreOffice’s development. There’s no great hurry, and OpenOffice still has many fans, but I think it’s better to switch to Libre sooner rather than later.

There are three reasons why I think LibreOffice will win. First, LibreOffice has many more programmers and far more community support. Second, LibreOffice’s choice of open source licences gives it an advantage. Third, LibreOffice has a better marketing strategy. This includes faster development, better distribution, a slicker website, and a greater focus on meeting customers’ needs.

The OpenOffice story

OpenOffice was born when Sun Microsystems bought a failed German program, Star Office, and made it open source. Much of the programming was done by Sun staff, and open source contributors were obliged to give Sun rights to use their code in its commercial version of Star Office. As a result, it never developed much of a community. Dissatisfaction with Sun’s stewardship eventually prompted most of the open-source developers – along with backers such as Novell, Red Hat, and Canonical – to defect, and they forked the code to create LibreOffice.

Sun Microsystems was also failing, and it was taken over by Oracle, the database software company. After LibreOffice came out, Oracle released one version of Oracle Open Office before deciding that the project wasn’t worth the effort. It laid off the programmers and gave the code and trademarks to the Apache Software Foundation, under Apache’s liberal open source license.

At that point, a handful of IBM employees were doing the majority of OpenOffice programming. IBM needed the code for its own office program, Lotus Symphony, which was another OpenOffice fork. But then IBM pulled out as well, giving its Symphony code to Apache.

Apache looks determined to continue the development of Apache OpenOffice, but without Sun, Oracle or IBM programmers, and without the sort of community support that powers LibreOffice, it’s hard to see the point. Indeed, Christian Schaller, a software engineering manager at Red Hat, recently wrote An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team to suggest that they “re-direct people who go to the openoffice.org website to the LibreOffice website instead.”

Licence matters

LibreOffice is being developed under two “copyleft” licences: GNU’s LGPLv3 and the Mozilla Public License (MPLv2). “Copyleft” licences try to ensure that the code contributed by open source programmers can only be re-used on the same terms. However, OpenOffice has changed from a “copyleft” (GPL) licence to a permissive Apache license, which means anybody can use the code for commercial purposes. Not everybody wants to write free code for somebody else’s benefit.

The difference in licences puts Apache OpenOffice at a disadvantage. It means that LibreOffice can take code from Apache OpenOffice (that’s the point of permissive licences) but Apache OpenOffice can’t take code from LibreOffice (that’s the point of “copyleft” license)s.

Indeed, Apache has had to replace OpenOffice code that was copyleft-only, but when it introduced a big new sidebar, LibreOffice was able to incorporate it immediately. (In fact, both versions got it from the same source: IBM’s Symphony.)

Since LibreOffice seems to have many more active programmers, and since Apache’s programmers are inevitably contributing to LibreOffice, I don’t see how Apache OpenOffice can keep up.

LO’s superior strategy

LibreOffice is now the default office suite in the majority of Linux distributions, and it’s aiming to release two versions a year, to match Ubuntu. Apache OpenOffice has no release schedule, but will release new versions when they are ready. This should mean that LibreOffice develops faster and attracts more users, which will attract more programmers.

LibreOffice also seems to have more of a customer focus: just compare the two websites. LibreOffice is trying to look slick and professional, and to attract users by providing a more polished product. Both organisations have obviously had to spent a lot of time trying to make OpenOffice’s code smaller, less buggy and less crashy. But the LibreOffice programmers have added features, improved compatibility with Microsoft and Apple file formats, and introduced Windows-specific improvements such as the ability to work with Microsoft’s Active Directory.

This is a striking contrast with the ethic that infused the old OpenOffice.org, which was controlled by Sun and IBM. Both saw Microsoft as a mortal enemy, and their main marketing proposition was that, regardless of how bad the product was, it wasn’t Microsoft. In my view, making a serious effort to meet users’ needs is better than any amount of pseudo-religious frothing.

What about Microsoft Office?

Whether you should go back to Microsoft Office is another matter. It offers many advantages in being both more powerful and easier to use. It also has more applications (there are no open-source equivalents to OneNote and Outlook, for example), and is compatible with the vast majority of the world’s documents. But if you have found that OpenOffice meets your needs, these must not be very important to you.

However, both OpenOffice and LibreOffice are modelled after Microsoft Office 1997-2003, when it was still a standalone office suite. Today, Office 365 is an ecosystem that includes online versions, a terabyte of online storage, and touch-oriented apps for Windows, Windows Phone, Google Android, and Apple iPads and iPhones. OpenOffice and LibreOffice simply don’t have the programmers, the cloud infrastructure or the money to compete.

Again, you’re the only person who can decide whether you would find these features useful. If you’re very mobile and want to read/edit files on several different types of devices, they would be. If you do everything on a desktop PC, they probably won’t be. Most people are between these two extremes.

Unfortunately, I can’t help you with OpenOffice Basic programming. It obviously resembles VBA (Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications) without being directly compatible, but I’ve never programmed in either. It might be worth having another look at VBA, but if you can’t get it to do what you want, there’s no point in switching back to Microsoft Office.

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