Does it make sense to merge openoffice and libreoffice (I'm talking about the tags on this site, of course)? They're technically different software, but very similar, and unlikely to diverge much.
asked May 12, 2011 at 21:32
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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1Would applying my logic behind my answer to the rhel, centos part of my previous answer make any sense? Looking at Wikipedia there are already a few differences, and as it's a fork I'd expert more to turn up. Of course, it could be merged until a time that the differences are that many that it's needed.– N JMay 12, 2011 at 21:53
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@NJ I think the situation is different. LibreOffice and OpenOffice haven't diverged much (yet), and LibreOffice is often branded as OpenOffice which will lead to confusion.– Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'May 12, 2011 at 22:22
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1then I think the latter option, merge them until a time that the differences are that many that it's needed.– N JMay 12, 2011 at 22:32
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1“unlikely to diverge much” – I disagree. From the time of the fork they have had a different philosophy altogether, so divergence was inevitable. LibreOffice took the community with them and started rewriting all of the crap code, whereas OpenOffice was left to try to make something commercial out of it and started stripping out all of the copyleft LGPL code. There is a reason why everyone has been switching to LibreOffice you know. ;-)– James HaighApr 26, 2014 at 18:38
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2 Answers
Yeah; I can't imagine actually needing distinct tags. I kept openoffice; there's a synonym for libreoffice now
answered May 12, 2011 at 22:42
These packages have actually already started to diverge and are likely to do so more. In particular the LibreOffice suite is integrating patches and making radical changes to different platforms including a a revamped rendering engine and changing the background technology on some platforms. Some plugins are already poking up as incompatible with one or the other suite.
Be prepared to un-alias this when issues start showing up with "works for me" answers and it turns out they aren't comparing apples and apples.
