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LibreOffice 5.2 Officially Released (softpedia.com)
prisoninmate writes from a report via Softpedia: LibreOffice 5.2 is finally here, after it has been in development for the past four months, during which the development team behind one of the best free office suites have managed to implement dozens of new features and improvements to most of the application's components. Key features include more UI refinements to make it flexible for anyone, standards-based document classification, forecasting functions in Calc, the spreadsheet editor, as well as lots of Writer and Impress enhancements. A series of videos are provided to see what landed in the LibreOffice 5.2 office suite, which is now available for download for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
What are you on about? Two months? Closer to two years! LO started in 2010. OpenOffice was, as far as anyone could tell, a dead project at that time. The LO folks spent a full year cleaning up the code before making their initial release in early 2011. It was half a year later that Oracle finally (after a year and a half!) announced they'd be relicensing the old OOo code and donating to Apache. What was LO supposed to do? Stop everything and wait to see if this promised code drop (of code they'd already spent a year cleaning up, and another six months improving and adding features to) actually happened, and start over from scratch? That would be dumb!
Now, for a while there, things might have gone in all sorts of different ways. I installed both, and was happy to go with whichever one turned out the best. But AOO completely failed to attract developers. They had some strong support from IBM for a while, but IBM seems to have abandoned them at this point. They're down to a tiny handful of developers, and they currently have a major security bug (CVE 2016-1513), and they can't even figure out how to get updates to their users, even though they have a patch!
I've got no skin in the game. I like Apache too. Have several friends who are members of the Foundation. But it's clear to me at this point that LO has won, and AOO is a dead project walking. AOO has about a dozen people who have contributed in the last year. LO has hundreds. LO has more changesets accepted per day than AOO has in months! LO has backing from several major companies, most notably RedHat and Collabora. AOO lost their only corporate sponsor, IBM, over a year ago.
You use what you want to. AOO is gone from my system, and I don't miss it at all. Being supported by Apache doesn't mean much if you haven't got any developers, and can't even figure out how to get a security fix out to your users!