Because of security vulnerabilities: LibreOffice advises against OpenOffice

The developers of the open-source office suite LibreOffice now explicitly advise against using Apache OpenOffice. In a post on Mastodon, they refer to security vulnerabilities that have been known for years but have still not been fixed. According to minutes of the Apache board meeting in March 2025, there are three security vulnerabilities in OpenOffice that are more than a year old. This was confirmed by a representative of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) security team at the request of the iX editorial team.

According to the log, there are numerous other problems with the Office software that have not yet been addressed. Previous logs indicate that the security vulnerabilities have existed since at least November 2023. "We are making progress in finding improvements to fix these issues," explains the ASF security team representative.

LibreOffice: Apache Foundation harms open source

The LibreOffice developers also accuse the ASF of no longer actively developing OpenOffice, but pretending to do so with small changes to HTML tags and blank lines. This harms the entire open source community. The ASF did not comment on these accusations. However, OpenOffice has an active project management committee and retains its status as a top-level project within the ASF, said spokesman Brian Proffitt. In fact, the commits in the OpenOffice GitHub repository recently consisted mainly of the revision of typos and individual adjustments to translations.

The current version 4.1.15 of OpenOffice was released in December 2023, with which the office suite received some bug fixes and updates to dictionaries. OpenOffice last received new functions with the release of version 4.1 in April 2014. In view of this, the LibreOffice team recommends using alternatives and promotes its own office program. The developers also criticized the fact that technology portals continue to recommend OpenOffice.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice have a common origin

OpenOffice emerged in 2000 from the published source code of StarOffice, which Sun Microsystems had previously acquired. After Sun was acquired by Oracle and became responsible for the development of OpenOffice, there was uncertainty in the community about the future of the office suite as Oracle became less supportive of the project. As a result, some community members founded the Document Foundation in September 2010 and split off LibreOffice. In June 2011, Oracle handed over OpenOffice to the Apache Software Foundation.

OpenOffice was also instrumental in the widespread adoption of the Open Document Format (ODF), which was recognized 20 years ago as the standard for an open source file format in office applications. In 2006, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted the format, which was increasingly used by government agencies and authorities. In Germany, the IT Planning Council wants to introduce ODF as the standard for document exchange in public administration by 2027.

(sfe)