[ale] libreoffice vs openoffice

[Greg Freemyer]

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 2:59 PM, Paul Cartwright <ale at pcartwright.com> wrote:
> ok, so it seems everyone is baling out of OpenOffice, and developing
> LibreOffice.. Cool.
> so what's the status? do we:
> continue using openoffice till it stops working
> switch right now to LibreOffice beta
> run both?

Why would OpenOffice quit working?  Do you think it has a timebomb in
it?  The current release should continue to work forever as far as I'm
concerned.

Anyway, I'm sure Oracle would call LibreOffice a fork, but that
OpenOffice will continue to be developed and continue to have new
releases.  Remember both LibreOffice and OpenOffice are GPL, so any
patches that go into one can be reviewed by the other and
incorporated.  That will be true unless Oracle takes OpenOffice
non-GPL which I seriously doubt is even possible at this point.

Personally I would continue to run the _released_ version of
openoffice until LibreOffice releases its first release at a minimum.

At that point you need to decide which branch you want to follow.
LibreOffice has already added in the Go-oo updates (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo) so if you don't want those you
should stick with openoffice.

Since I'm a openSUSE user and they have been shipping go-oo in their
distro all along, I'm sure that's the branch I will follow, but I
seriously doubt I upgrade before next spring when the whole openSUSE
distro is updated.

Greg