Superficially, the two suites appear almost identical, and LibreOffice even carries over its version numbering from the last release.īehind the scenes, however, the Document Foundation and its volunteers have been hard at work, cleaning up the code, fixing bugs, and adding features. Like, LibreOffice includes a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a presentation maker (Impress), a drawing and diagramming program (Draw), and a database manager (Base). Meanwhile, buzz has been building around LibreOffice, a fork of the code by a consortium of former developers known as the Document Foundation.
Oracle eventually donated the code to the Apache Foundation, which promises a new release this year. has long been one of the top competitors to Microsoft Office, but the open source productivity suite's future was clouded in 2009 when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, which had maintained since late 1999.