Well, basically, LibreOffice forked while OpenOffice was languishing under Oracle and no one knew what would happen. Since then, it has actually generally had m

Well, basically, LibreOffice forked while OpenOffice was languishing under Oracle and no one knew what would happen. Since then, it has actually generally had more development than OpenOffice; there was a long period of time in which OpenOffice development halted while it was being moved over to Apache, and relicensed under the Apache license. In the meantime, LibreOffice was receiving active development and new features, and many distros started shipping it because it was actually shipping and ready while Apache OpenOffice was still being held up in bureaucracy. Now that Apache OpenOffice is starting to ship and receive development (much in the form of porting features from Lotus Symphony, which has also been donated to the Apache project), they are being developed pretty much independently. There's a certain amount of acrimony between the projects, which is unfortunate. But there's also the unfortunate case that due to licens issues, it would be hard to merge the projects. LibreOffice is licensed under the LGPLv3, while OpenOffice has been relicensed under the Apache License (Oracle allowed their portions to be relicensed, and some of what remained from third-parties was thrown out or rewritten). This means that LibreOffice can incorporate code from OpenOffice, while OpenOffice cannot incorporate code from LibreOffice (at least, without work to turn it into separate libraries or changing the license back to LGPL). So, due to the acrimony between the projects, and licensing issues, they are pretty much developing independently now, with some code moving between them when possible.