After LibreOffice came out, Oracle released one version of Oracle Open Office before deciding that the project wasn’t worth the effort. Sun Microsystems was also failing, and it was taken over by Oracle, the database software company. 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. As a result, it never developed much of a community. 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. OpenOffice was born when Sun Microsystems bought a failed German program, Star Office, and made it open source.

This includes faster development, better distribution, a slicker website, and a greater focus on meeting customers’ needs. Third, LibreOffice has a better marketing strategy. Second, LibreOffice’s choice of open source licences gives it an advantage. First, LibreOffice has many more programmers and far more community support. And it already replaces in major Linux Distros (ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, etc).There are three reasons why I think LibreOffice will win. The GPL office suite even got more serious a while ago with a new heavyweight board. Google, RedHat, Canonical, Novell and others are showing support for LibreOffice. In a nutshell, and to answer your question, LibreOffice is the brightest future could ever had :) LibreOffice 3.4.1 has been already released and packed with stable new features. Meanwhile, after failing to monetize it, Oracle donated OpenOffice to the Apache foundation (hey IBM ) ) However, for developers the current focus on code cleanup is very important and will increase the number of contributors. From a user perspective, no major UI changes so far. The foundation quickly raised funds and started by cleaning the code base.

They created a foundation: The Document Foundation and changed the BSD licence (which meant you could develop and commercialize the way IBM used to do with Lotus Syphony) to our well loved GPL :) Some developers forked OpenOffice and created LibreOffice. While some of these fears turned to reality (with Oracle dumping OpenSolaris), the database giant plans for were not so clear and the office suite future seemed in danger. When SUN was acquired by Oracle, the open source community was afraid that Oracle kills SUN's open source software, which included, OpenSolaris, MySQL, etc.

Libreoffice or openoffice 2018