What is the difference between Office Libre and Open Office?

LibreOffice has technical advantage because it is released under a copyleft license, unlike OpenOffice. Useful code can be copied from OpenOffice to LibreOffice but not vice versa. Thus LibreOffice contains all useful features of OpenOffice and more.

Both licenses are free software but only copylefted LibreOffice is guaranteed to remain so. OpenOffice (forks) can turn proprietary.

OpenOffice is certainly a better known name among the general public but the very strictly regulated nature of the development under Sun Microsystems has caused much bad blood associated with the name in the developer community. Public perception will likely change. Now e.g. Debian and all it's derivatives, Trisquel included, come with LibreOffice.

You might want to read the whole history of the office suite and it's various reincarnations, it's quite interesting actually.

Just to add to this. Libre Office is a fork of OpenOffice.org. It was created as a result of Oracles inaction on what was going to happen with OpenOffice.org in the early days of the Sun acquisition. Under Sun OpenOffice.org was developed and there was no community involvement. Sun didn't work with the community even though it was developed largely under a free software license. This angered many.

As a result Go-oo was created and used for a while. It combined patches from third parties.

It became obsoled by the creation of Libre Office (which was the result of the inaction by Oracle on what was going to happen to OpenOffice.org).

Ultimately Libre Office became the dominate project and after that Oracle handed the copyright over to the Apache foundation- or at least everything around it. It isn't clear if Oracle actually has copyright on it. But the code is under an appropriate license mostly.

The Go-oo fork and the new Libre Office fork don't include the non-free Java components that OpenOffice.org use to include. I believe this is now gone from the OpenOffice.org code base as well with the release of the Apache version.

Long story short... Libre Office is the dominant project and OpenOffice.org may end up an abandoned project. I'm not sure who/or if anybody is actively working on it. Somehow I doubt Oracle is working on it, I'm doubtful the Apache foundation is working on it even if they are managing it, and I think while IBM had worked with Sun on its development a bit they probably have moved on to the Go-oo codebase given it's the new standard. IBM had 25 developers working on it if I recall correctly.

However keep in mind IBM has its own version of the code. I'm not entirely sure what non-free parts IBM might be including in the version they release. If they are contributing back to the Go-oo version I don't know what or how much is given to the project.

I believe the Apache Foundation has more important things to worry about these days like Hadoop. Btw, has anyone tried to setup Hadoop on a Trisquel machine? I know you can manually set it up or use the https://launchpad.net/~hadoop-ubuntu/+archive/stable PPA for Trisquel 5.5 and above.

Even though Hadoop and the packages it can use (HBase, Hive, Pig) are under the Apache 2.0 license and not copyleft, is it still a complete free software solution?