hi, i’ve been using openoffice for long time now and it works just fine, is there some good reason to change with libreoffice and give it a try?
LibreOffice (LO) seems to pursue a more aggressive development model and is dual-licenced under LGPL and MPL. Apache OpenOffice (AOO) seems to pursue a more conservative development model and is only licensed under AL, which is compatible with the MPL. This means that while LO can receive all updates made to AOO, the reverse is not always true. A large amount of code-clean-up has been done to LO, which has simplified and improved future maintenance / development possibility. The community and user-base for LO is still significantly smaller than that for AOO, which also appears to have historical broader brand-appeal, however this is changing over time. Many people do move between and are involved with both communities without animosity in the spirit of collaboration and supporting free software.
For the most part the two products are identical, but over time differences are becoming apparent. Refer this answer about Base compatibility, for example. Most differences are corner-cases at this point in time. These questions are also related:
Meh… just try it out - it’s free and you can have both of them installed at the same time.