linux.com: If the arrival of Windows 8 opened new doors for Linux in the world of desktop operating systems last fall, then it seems fair to say that the recent arrival of Microsoft Office 2013 and Office 365 has surely done something similar for free and open source office suites.

computerworld.com.au: The city council in Freiburg, Germany, is planning to ditch an open source office suite and go back to using Microsoft Office.

linuxinsider.com (blog safari): Well it's been a momentous few weeks for FOSS fans recently, not least because LibreOffice -- one of the most popular exemplars of free and open source software today -- celebrated its second anniversary late last month.

robweir.com: You may have read, on the Apache OpenOffice blog, news that the project has had 5 million downloads in the first 6 weeks since the release of version 3.4. And as the above chart shows, the download rate has increased in the past two weeks, as we’ve started to roll out the upgrade notifications to OpenOffice.org 3.3 users.

networkworld.com: Nearly 9 out of 10 downloads of the new version of OpenOffice have been for Windows machines, rather than Linux, according to recently released statistics from Apache.

linuxinsider.com (blog safari): Would a rose by any other name still smell as sweet? Or would it, perhaps, end up sweeter? That, essentially, is the question at the heart of the forking process. Namely: Now that we have LibreOffice, do we still need OpenOffice?

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• Apache OpenOffice - Interview with Jürgen Schmidt

internetnews.com: If anyone had any real doubt, IBM is the one solid reason why OpenOffice still exits. Linux distros big and small have all left for the superior open source experience that is LibreOffice, yet IBM is stuck in the past.

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• Libreoffice repo for EL6

infoworld.com: In its new role as steward of the OpenOffice.org open source office suite, the Apache Software Foundation expects to offer an Apache-branded version of the package for developers in 2012.

dedoimedo.com: It's been about a year and a half since I have last reviewed OpenOffice4Kids (OOo4Kids), which is a special version of OpenOffice for children aged 6-12 more or less. Now, the software has grown to version 1.2. Let's see what it can do.

pcworld.com (IDG): Despite the growing momentum of the LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is urging the community of volunteer developers to rally around the OpenOffice code base as the canonical version of the open source software suite.

theregister.co.uk: On Wednesday a new website will be launched with many donation options, spokesperson Andreas Jäger told The Register: "The organisation will also look for a major investor, but one that fits the product."

networkworld.com: Over the weekend, LibreOffice took the Experiment award for most appreciated software at the Open World Forum in Paris. I use LibreOffice every day, so I definitely think the award is well-deserved. Here are three particularly useful add-ons to improve your office tools:

h-online.com: Michael Meeks, a LibreOffice developer at Novell, compared the codebase of LibreOffice with the OpenOffice.org sources hosted at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). As he writes in a blog post, the differences are already so great that it will now be hard to exchange new code between the two projects.