which is easier to use openoffice or libreoffice

'We want to be able to switch from one Linux distribution to another.' The court also demands that open source solutions must be common: 'We do not want to be locked in to a specialised open source application.'

Software solutions must be independent from IT vendors. Three months ago, the court's IT department included a few requirements specific to open source in its strategy, Brunner said. The court moved to using open source following an IT strategy that originally only specified the use of open IT standards, Brunner told the conference attendees. The court has about 460 desktop PCs, all running OpenOffice. The court is one of the country's prime examples of a public administration using free and open source solutions.

However, the former suite is more stable and is available on mobile computing platforms, he says, while the latter benefits from a bigger community of developers, introducing more new features. The Swiss Federal Supreme Court uses OpenOffice, but according to Brunner would benefit from the improved document filters that are available in LibreOffice. 'I had to test this presentation in both suites, to see if it would work.' The current division between the two groups risks creating more instead of less incompatibilities, Brunner warned last week, speaking at the LibreOffice conference, which took place in the Swiss city of Bern. Merging the two projects will convince more public administrations to use the open source office suite, he believes. The software developers working on Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice - two closely related suites of open source office productivity tools - should overcome their schism and unite to compete with the ubiquitous proprietary alternative, urges Daniel Brunner, head of the IT department of Switzerland's Federal Supreme Court.

Which is easier to use openoffice or libreoffice