The idea to write OpenCReports started with my getting acqauinted with RLIB in 2005 and working with it (and on it) for a very long time, with the original implementors finally losing interest in developing RLIB further. This was around 2018. Even the original documentation site for RLIB was retired. But thanks to the Internet Archive, it may still be read

To overcome some of the shortcomings seen in RLIB, its ideas were used for a completely new implementation with high level of compatibility to the original.

RLIB is a report generator library, so is OpenCReports. In this documentation, a lot of references contain comparisons to RLIB.

The name OpenCReports came from the fact that it's implemented in the C programming language in an open way, and using a free software license.