A Project Adrift
To understand LibreOffice, you have to start with its ancestor, OpenOffice.org. For years, it was the leading open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, stewarded by Sun Microsystems. But in 2010, tech giant Oracle acquired Sun, and a cloud of uncertainty
descended upon the project. The vibrant community of developers who contributed to OpenOffice.org grew wary. Oracle had a reputation for being less than friendly to the open-source projects it inherited, and fears grew that development would stagnate or, worse, become closed off. The community that had poured years into the code base felt a storm was coming; they were a crew on a ship whose new captain seemed indifferent to its fate.
The Declaration of Independence
Rather than wait for the ship to sink, a large group of the most active developers took decisive action. In September 2010, they announced the creation of The Document Foundation, a new, independent, non-profit organization based in Germany. They took a copy of the OpenOffice.org code—a process known as "forking"—and christened it "LibreOffice," with "libre" signifying the freedom they sought. This wasn't just a technical move; it was a political statement. They were creating a new home for the project, one governed by the community itself, free from the whims of a single corporate owner. Dozens of key contributors resigned from the Oracle-led project and threw their weight behind the new foundation.
More Than Just Legal Text
Here lies the crucial difference, the decision that shaped everything that followed. When Oracle eventually relinquished control of the original OpenOffice and gave it to the Apache Software Foundation, it was re-licensed under the permissive Apache License. This license allows anyone to take the code, modify it, and even make their version proprietary without sharing the improvements back. LibreOffice's founders chose a different path: a dual license of LGPLv3 and MPL. This type of "copyleft" license acts as a shield. While it allows for broad use, it includes a critical requirement: if you modify the core LibreOffice code, you must share those modifications back with the community. A company couldn't just take the code, build a better proprietary version, and starve the original project. The license guaranteed that the community's work would always benefit the community.
Two Paths, One Origin
The results of this one decision speak for themselves. The licensing choice created a one-way street for code. LibreOffice, under the LGPL, was free to incorporate any improvements made to Apache OpenOffice. Apache OpenOffice, however, could not legally incorporate the torrent of improvements made to LibreOffice. The result was predictable. LibreOffice flourished, attracting thousands of contributors and releasing dozens of major updates with new features and security fixes. Apache OpenOffice, meanwhile, has languished. Its last major release was in 2014, and development has slowed to a crawl, at times struggling to even patch critical security flaws. The vibrant community had chosen its home, and it was the one protected by the stronger legal shield.
