LibreOffice and OOo 3.3: third and ninth RC’s released

The number of Release Candidates of OpenOffice.org 3.3 continues to grow, with the ninth version now made available. The break away LibreOffice 3.3, a product separate from Oracle, have now released a third Release Candidate.

In mid-December 2010 Oracle released a commercial version of the Open Office 3.3 suite, while also launching their online Cloud Office suite. Open Office 3.3 is based on OpenOffice.org 3.3 which is available for free, but which has strangely still not been released as a final version. We will have to continue to wait as they have now posted a ninth Release Candidate version online.

At practically the same time, the Document Foundation also announced an RC version of their product, with this being the third RC of LibreOffice 3.3. This suite is a break away from the OpenOffice.org project. It uses the same code as OOo, although with a completely different development community who are independent, notably from Oracle.

It appears that the time has almost arrived when end users will have to make a decision between OpenOffice.org 3.3 and LibreOffice 3.3. The differences between these two multiplatform, free office suites are probably not very noticeable, with differences to be seen over time as the LibreOffice product is still young in its development.

Surprisingly though is that in OpenOffice.org it is possible to open (read only) MS Office 2007 and 2010 documents, while editing and saving options are also available in LibreOffice 3.3 for OOXML format. A member of the Document Foundation’s executive committee Charles-H Schulz explains that the same possibility exists in OpenOffice.org, but was intentionally blocked in 2007-2008 for strategic reasons. LibreOffice nevertheless restates their ongoing attachment to ODF.