[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Not really. The point of the GPL is that you very specifically want copyleft.
Open-source is not just about letting other people use code -- it's also about politically controlling what they can do with it.

The Free Software Foundation is a political movement these days. If I did anything I'd release as open source, I would not apply the GPL to it. I'd use something like a BSD or MIT license.

I gave up on the GPL when GPL v2 and GPL v3 were incompatible with each other. Should opportunity permit, I'll be delighted to tell Richard M. Stallman "Congratulations. You are now part of the problem.", and ostentatiously walk away in disgust.

There is a bit more to it, I think, than just "does it open MS Office files".

How much more depends on who you are and what you do.

LibreOffice has more developers and a bigger active community, so it gets developed (and bugfixed) faster.
LibreOffice has better support for importing MS Office formats, and actually supports saving to MS Office formats.

OO does too, the last I looked. The sticky point for folks I knew was compatibility with MS Word's Track Changes feature, as they were writers whose editors expected to get Word docs as submissions and used Track Changes for line edits. I know a couple who would be perfectly happy with LO or OO, but kept Honest to God Word around specifically to be sure they wuld be compatible with the editor.

They also got rolling with Coverity and apparently spent quite some time systematically fixing every bug it reported.
IME LibreOffice starts much faster and runs more smoothly.

I run it here, and intend to continue. I began back before Oracle turned the code base over the the Apache foundation, because I didn't trust Oracle's long term intentions.

So yeah, the code has diverged enough to be a meaningfully different product. Just because it is a HUGE project based on the same codebase and hasn't changed enough to be completely unrecognizable, doesn't mean it hasn't changed.

My point was only that if all you wanted was something you could use instead of MS Office to read and write Office files, either would do.

Hmm, well, I guess that is actually a good point.

I'll be delighted if LO reaches the point of having a comparable Android port. There's an Android LO viewer app out there, with experimental editing support, but it's still what I'd call alpha code.

The OO port actually works, but you better have over 300MB of free app storage to install it.
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Dennis