Editions of OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is open source under the LGPL and has splintered into many editions. Most editions are 99% the same. The 1% are typically system integration and progressive features.

To make it confusing, some editions use the OpenOffice.org brand.

The most popular edition is the “vanilla” edition, also called the upstream, mainstream, official, and Sun Microsystems edition. It is available from http://www.OpenOffice.org and is especially popular among Windows users.

The next group of editions is ooo-build. Many Linux distributions ship ooo-build. Editions based on ooo-build include

• Debian
• Frugalware
• www.Go-oo.org
• Mandriva
• Novell
• OxygenOffice
• Ubuntu (list of patches)
• SUSE

Fedora ships a modified OpenOffice.org (list of patches), but Fedora does not use ooo-build.

Variations of OpenOffice.org with their own brands include StarOffice, NeoOffice, BrOffice, IBM Lotus Symphony, EuroOffice, and Beijing Redflag CH2000's RedOffice.

When OpenOffice.org is running, click on Help and then About. The vanilla OpenOffice.org about dialog is mostly white like this:

Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10's dialog is brown and mentions both Debian and Ubuntu:

Systems that use ooo-build may pick and choose from a menu of modifications that include:

• Backport of alpha-quality Microsoft Office 2007 import filters to OpenOffice.org 2.x
• Gstreamer multimedia support on Linux
• Kohei Yoshida's Calc linear optimization solver (before OpenOffice.org 3)
• Microsoft Works text document (.wps) import using libwps
• Microsoft VBA improvement
• T602 import
• Improved EMF rendering
• Cairo canvas rendering for anti-aliased graphics
• Small bug fixes and performance improvements

Additionally, ooo-build distributions can choose to compile the vanilla OpenOffice.org with changes including:

• Enabling Quickstarter on Linux
• Including the 3D OpenGL transitions in OpenOffice.org 2.4+ (built in, not as an extension

• Discover Go-oo.org
• ooo-build patches