[sf-lug] Blue star Linux

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Alex Kleider (akleider at sonic.net):

> On 2020-04-26 15:51, John Strazzarino wrote:
> > OpenOffice 4.7 is included.
> 
> I thought LibreOffice was currently the recommended item.
> Am I wrong?

LibreOffice is by far the more-active fork.  I would recommend it in
preference.

OpenOffice had a twisty history, getting caught up in Oracle
Corporation's 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which made Oracle
the owner of key copyrights.  The vast majority of the developer
community for various reasons (only some, well, most, of them involving
hatred of Oracle) forked the codebase at that time, moving over to
successor codebase LibreOffice under new project custodian 'Document
Foundation'.

Oracle let OpenOffice languish for a while, but soon (2011) signed over
ownership and project management to Apache Foundation, which remains to
this day its theoretical boss[1] -- and few people dislike/distrust
Apache Foundation the way many do Oracle, _but_ the 2010 mindshare shift
to LibreOffice has remained overwhelming, and, last I checked,
LibreOffice remains substantially better maintained.

A minor difference is that LibreOffice is a wee bit more copyleft-ish,
as the Document Foundation custodians started admitting some code under
GPL,

[1] This is why, starting 2011, the program's official name became
'Apache OpenOffice'.  Before that, its formal name was 'OpenOffice.org'
because of a trademark conflict with a Belgian company (but most people
ignored that legal sidestep and called it 'OpenOffice').