OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice - Politics or Worth switching

[mathgeek2000]

Some time ago OpenOffice started as a product made by Sun Microsystems. Later Sun was bought by Oracle, so OpenOffice & VirtualBox and the others now have that branding.

Why is reasoning behind switching to LibreOffice? How does OpenOffice 3.3 compare to LibreOffice 3.3. Are there any advantages to one over the other? Did Canonical switch Office suites because they hope LibreOffice will have better support going forward, or is it a better program now?

As I understand it, LibreOffice started with OpenOffice Source Code, and a new company developing it.

[false truths]

From my experience, LibreOffice is developing at a much faster rate then OpenOffice. It already handles Office 2010 files well enough that I don't need Windows to create presentations or write papers.

Overall, they're extremely similar, but the source code of LibreOffice is, I personally think, better built for competing with the current industry standard, Microsoft Office.

[Copper Bezel]

The politics have made it worth switching. = ) As I understand it, most of the devs followed the Libre fork. So yes, it's doing substantially better for itself.

[Hagar Delest]

Source code of LibO was OOo plus some of the patches developed by Novell team.

Most of the coders are part of Sun/Oracle. The "most of the devs" you're talking about are the ones from the community. As their contribution was not really integrated by the official team (that was one of the reasons why they forked), their volume was not that big.

Now, switching has a part of politics if you want but it depends on the use of OOo. Personally, I use it for work so I'll use the one that is the most robust. There is at least one show stopper for me in LibO so can't use it. So install both of them, test and decide.