The executable installers for both suites are similar they ask the same questions and the install scripts seem identical, although LibreOffice setup is a little slower. Because I wanted to test the most typical Office-replacement scenario, however, I ran both suites on an Intel PC running Windows 7. You can also get for Solaris (Sparc and Intel).

The modules provide word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, business graphics, database management, and formula editing, respectively.īoth suites are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X (Intel and PowerPC). Installation and language support and LibreOffice each consists of six applications, called Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base, and Math in both suites. Which one will be the better bet for now or in the foreseeable future? I installed both to find out. Both are available as free downloads (although Oracle also sells a version of that includes commercial support). The question is, which suite should you use? Both and LibreOffice recently announced version 3.3.0 of their respective wares. (The 'libre' in the suite's name is derived from a Latinate root meaning 'liberty.') The difference is that LibreOffice is being developed in a fully community-driven way, without oversight from Oracle. It even reads and writes 's OpenDocument file formats. LibreOffice looks like and it runs like. The result was LibreOffice, a new fork of the code base that's maintained by a nonprofit organization called the Document Foundation.

Before long, key developers, unhappy with the status quo under Oracle, began defecting from the project. But when Oracle acquired Sun in April 2009, the future of Sun's software offerings - particularly free ones like - was called into question. Originally developed as StarOffice in the late 1990s, the suite had been managed in recent years by Sun Microsystems as an open source project. is one of the leading competitors to the Microsoft Office suite of business productivity applications.

Openoffice org draw