If you still use OpenOffice, you might want to consider going ahead and changing up to LibreOffice. Since LibreOffice forked off from OpenOffice and took most of OpenOffice’s more active developers with it, Oracle’s OpenOffice development has generally languished while LibreOffice’s has chugged right along.
Most importantly, there is a major security hole present in OpenOffice, involving files from Hangul Word Processor, an obscure Korean word processor format. The same hole was in LibreOffice, but LibreOffice patched it on April 25. OpenOffice recommended users delete the Hangul DLL file from their installation directory, and promised to fix it in the next release…which still hasn’t come out yet.
I learned about this issue from a blogger who posted a hyperbole-filled rant telling users to “get the hell off OpenOffice.” While his post was a bit enthusiastic, he provided links to a number of different sources confirming his information, some of which I’ve linked above.
Even leaving security holes aside, LibreOffice is simply a much more polished experience now, thanks to the additional development that has taken place. And given that they’re both based on the same project, you shouldn’t need to worry about OO files being compatible with LO.
So, if you’re still using OpenOffice, it’s a good time to switch up.
