European tech firms will ship the first stable release of Euro-Office next month, giving governments and businesses worldwide a ready-to-run, sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs.
OO is significantly closer to MS office UI wise. As to why they forked it, OO was basically only open source on paper and didn’t really accept external contributions. They tried to shut down this fork with some dubious legal claims that are blatantly in conflict with at least the spirit of the open source license as icing on the cake.
They explain it on their website : their internal logic for a document is based on OOXML logic, while LO is rather based on a ODT-based logic. So compatibility with Office is more straightforward in OO (though we know Microsoft is not quite exactly following the OOXML norm, so still not perfect…)
Is one project clearly more important than the other these days? Given the gargantuan effort that goes into these suites I’m surprised we can talk about two of them credibly and in the context of open source.
OO is significantly closer to MS office UI wise. As to why they forked it, OO was basically only open source on paper and didn’t really accept external contributions. They tried to shut down this fork with some dubious legal claims that are blatantly in conflict with at least the spirit of the open source license as icing on the cake.
It’s not just UI wise.
They explain it on their website : their internal logic for a document is based on OOXML logic, while LO is rather based on a ODT-based logic. So compatibility with Office is more straightforward in OO (though we know Microsoft is not quite exactly following the OOXML norm, so still not perfect…)
Is one project clearly more important than the other these days? Given the gargantuan effort that goes into these suites I’m surprised we can talk about two of them credibly and in the context of open source.
It also supports epub files, unlike libreoffice