Best of all, both suites can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. OpenOffice was provided by Sun Microsystems, the company known for the programming language, Java. But in 2010, Sun was taken over by Oracle which had no interest in advancing OpenOffice. Due to this, the open community that was working with Sun Microsystems on the project took the open source and created a fork which they called LibreOffice. Oracle did not realize the can of worms they had opened and soon to become a company that people would loved to hate. After an large backlash from thousands around the world who loved OpenOffice, Oracle finally did turn OpenOffice over to Apache Software Foundation to maintain. Today LibreOffice is being maintained and updated at a faster rate than OpenOffice. I believe this is due to Apache's main focus is their web server software. I personally been exclusively using LibreOffice for many years now.
Now we have two great office suites to select from.
LibreOffice website License: Mozilla Public License Version 2.0
OpenOffice website License: Apache-2.0
About Apache:
Apache is a non-profit corporation to support Apache software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server. The software they produce is distributed under the terms of the Apache License and is therefore free and open source software (FOSS). More Info: Apache Wikipedia Article
Read more of my personal experiences, including problems and how I solved them in Working With LibreOffice/OpenOffice
Personal note: On my newer versions of Linux I have begun using LibreOffice (My current version as of this page edit is 5.6.1.2) . I haven't had any problems with it.
I love the feature of being able to go back reopen a PDF with LibreOffice to edit it. This is due to LibreOffice ability to embed a copy of the ODF file within the PDF.
LibreOffice is now the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It is compatible with Windows,Linux, Mac OSX PPC, and Solaris x86 and Solaris SPARC.It normally uses an international open standard format to store your files, but it can also read and write files used by other common office software. It can also take any document you have created and export it as a PDF, LaTeX, BibTeX, or MediaWiki
Below is a screen snapshot* of the latest file formats I can open with my LibreOffice (ver 5.1.6.2).
*Snapshot taken of the file type selection menu within the Open File dialog box