Open Source Office History: LibreOffice Celebrates Fifth Anniversary

LibreOffice, the open source productivity suite widely used on GNU/Linux as well as Windows and Mac systems, celebrates its fifth birthday this week. Here’s a look at where it’s been and where it’s going.

LibreOffice wasn’t born under entirely happy circumstances. Its emergence was the result of Oracle‘s acquisition in early 2010 of Sun Microsystems, which maintained the leading open source office suite of the time, OpenOffice.org. Concerns within the OpenOffice developer community that Oracle might not keep all of the code open, or would cease to support development, prompted some programmers to fork the OpenOffice code base into LibreOffice.

To support their efforts, those programmers on September 28, 2010, launched the Document Foundation, which has overseen LibreOffice development since the time of the latter’s birth. The Document Foundation also published a manifesto that lays out a broader open source agenda, including goals such as supporting the availability of software for minority language groups and opposing proprietary document formats.

The first version of LibreOffice launched in January 2011. Most major GNU/Linux distributions adopted it in place of OpenOffice as their default productivity suite.

Meanwhile, OpenOffice lived on under Oracle’s thumb until June 2011, when Oracle transferred the OpenOffice trademarks and most of the code to Apache. Apache has maintained its own OpenOffice derivative since then under the name Apache OpenOffice. That platform has received a weak reception by the community, however, and has lacked dedicated developers. Today, Apache OpenOffice is mostly a stagnant project.

Meanwhile, LibreOffice has flourished over the last five years. It gained features that set it apart from OpenOffice. It remained the go-to office suite for GNU/Linux distribution developers. It enjoyed large-scale adoptions by agencies aiming to replace Microsoft (MSFT) Office, including most recently the Italian government.

Personally, I haven’t always been the biggest fan of LibreOffice. I find myself turning to Google Docs or Microsoft Word in Wine more often than I would like these days.

Still, there’s little doubt at this point that LibreOffice has won the open source office-productivity wars—if we may call the post-Oracle acquisition state of OpenOffice as such. It has also emerged as the world’s leading answer to Microsoft Office even on Windows and OS X systems. (Unfortunately, a good Android or iOS implementation of LibreOffice remains elusive—though tablet and smartphone mobile devices are probably not the places where people are doing most of their serious word processing anyway.)

All of this bodes well for LibreOffice’s future. Expect the developers to continue their impressively steady pace of regular releases, and to continue making open source office productivity the best it can be.

Here’s hoping the day is not far off when I can rm -r my Wine folder and make LibreOffice my only office suite.