LibreOffice an Open Source Alternative to MS Office

After a headline lull, LibreOffice on Wednesday renewed its drive to replace Microsoft Office with the newest version of its open source suite of applications. The latest update comes as the organization behind LibreOffice says that its products are now being used by some 80 million users around the world. In contrast, only 10 million users had downloaded the software by Sept. 2011.

LibreOffice came about as part of a grass roots response to tech industry consolidation. In 2010, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, which was then responsible for an open-source software suite called OpenOffice. However, developers who became unhappy with Oracle's stewardship of the project, subsequently forked the code to create a new office suite called LibreOffice. The OpenOffice project has since been taken up by the Apache Foundation while LibreOffice wound up under the auspices of The Document Foundation.