Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

The announcement in this forum dated November 18, 2018, says that OpenOffice version 4.1.6 has just been released.

I am using LibreOffice version 6.1.2.1.

I was wondering what the difference is between OpenOffice and LibreOffice??

LibreOffice is 7 years ahead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice

Practical answer - There isn't a whole lot of difference for ordinary users. The most obvious in terms of function, I think, is support of MS Office formats. LibreOffice can save documents in the current MS Office formats of docx, xlsx, etc. OpenOffice can save in the old MS Office formats like doc and xls but not the newer ones. OpenOffice can open documents in the newer MS formats, though not as well and LibreOffice, I hear. There are also some user interface differences.

Political/historical answer - A few years ago, OpenOffice was under the control of Oracle, the big database company, and many developers were unhappy with Oracle's governance. The code was forked to create LibreOffice and it is supported by Linux-associated companies. LIbreOffice is under much more active development and it has a policy of frequent releases. Most Linux distributions include LibreOffice and not OpenOffice. Shortly after the fork, Oracle donated OpenOffice to the Apache Software Foundation. IBM was then involved in supporting OpenOffice, donated the code for the Sidebar feature and provided QA support. IBM ended support after a year or two, having hit a rough time economically. Since then, OpenOffice has changed slowly and much of the development there is involves under-the-hood aspects like build strategies that users don't care about.
The two products also have different license strategies. LibreOffice is mostly under copyleft licenses, GPL and maybe a Mozilla license. OpenOffice uses the permissive Apache License v2. That means that LibreOffice can use code from OpenOffice but code cannot flow the other way without relicensing. Users don't care about the license but people working on the projects can get really animated about it.

I would say there isn't a strong reason to use one over the other if you are working on your own. If you have to deal with other people using MS Office formats, LibreOffice may be better but using non native formats is often a source of trouble.

Be aware that we get many pleas for help on Forum from LibreOffice users whose .docx file has corrupted. I remain with OO for file stability (but then I always work in .odt format).

OpenOffice can open documents in the newer MS formats, though not as well and LibreOffice

It depends. In my experience, AOO handles spreadsheets a bit better than LO.

I appreciate the replies. I think I'll stay with LO - I only use its drawing program. When I can no longer install MSOffice2000 then I'll use the rest of LO.

Concerning Draw I don't think it was much improved in either branch. (See LibO Release Notes 5.0, 6.0, 6.1 ...)
The most relevant changes in LibO shoud be those to the UI.

LibreOffice was OK through version 5. I tried version 6 and I was immediately repulsed by the change of screen formats and its overall sluggishness compared to version 5. The first time I used Calc it took me about 20 min. just to find a certain function which had been moved and buried in another menu. So I removed LibreOffice 6 and installed OpenOffice 4.1.6. Familiar formats and it runs MUCH faster than LibreOffice 6. I have always preferred OpenOffice over LibreOffice. For that reason I will eventually be converting all 5 of my Lenovo Thinkpads to OpenOffice.