MEPIS Community Forum

Source: InfoWorld
By: Neil McAllister

Dueling open source alternatives to Microsoft Office match word processors, spreadsheets, and much more; which one should you choose? OpenOffice.org is one of the leading competitors to the Microsoft Office suite of business productivity applications. Originally developed as StarOffice in the late 1990s, the suite had been managed in recent years by Sun Microsystems as an open source project. But when Oracle acquired Sun in April 2009, the future of Sun's software offerings -- particularly free ones like OpenOffice.org -- was called into question. Before long, key OpenOffice.org developers, unhappy with the status quo under Oracle, began defecting from the project.

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No dilemma for me.
I switched from OO.org to LibreOffice. Most OO.org developers have switched to help developing/advancing LibreOffice.

Ko

I don't see what the dilemma is either.

Most of the major distros, including Debian, have switched (or they are in the process of switching) to LibreOffice.

The openoffice.org* packages currently in sid are nothing more than transitional packages which replace the existing OOo with LibreOffice.

Just did a (squeeze), not squeeze, sid, upgrade that did just that, replaced OO with Libre.

EDIT: Not squeeze, sid.

made the switch as well. As kmathern says, if you use Debian repos, at some point you'll end up with libreoffice unless you manually install openoffice.

for personal use? no dilemna.

however, there well could be a dilemna if you go between your personal computer and have to use a computer at work, campus, etc. that only has OO. many organizations are slow to install new software until it can be tested for stability, dependencies, etc., so there is a real chance that LO may not be installed for sometime. in theory, the formats are suppose to be the same and interchangeable between OO & LO, but this may not continue to be the case with minor issues popping up over time as features are added and changes made.

for me the dilemna is, do i change and run the risk of having presentations, etc. that i gen'd in LO not be properly formatted in OO...

Something to be concerned about. I tend to forget that some folks still have to work. Ahh the luxury of retirement.

Are you sure you got it from squeeze? Or did you upgrade to sid?

You are right it was sid, confused my two systems.

Surely the file format is identical, so there shouldn't be any problems. If in doubt just generate a pdf version as well and you're good to go. That's what I tend to do...