History and Evolution of OpenOffice and LibreOffice
- OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, was an open-source office suite derived from the earlier StarOffice. The project has since been discontinued.
- In August 1999, Star Division was acquired by Sun Microsystems for $59.5 million, a cost-effective alternative to licensing Microsoft Office for its 42,000 staff.
- Sun Microsystems open-sourced OpenOffice in July 2000 as a competitor to Microsoft Office, with version 1.0 released on May 1, 2002.
- After acquiring Sun Microsystems in January 2010, Oracle Corporation continued developing OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, renaming it Oracle Open Office. In September 2010, many external developers left due to management concerns, forming The Document Foundation (TDF), which released the fork LibreOffice in January 2011. Most Linux distributions, including Oracle Linux, soon adopted LibreOffice.
- In April 2011, Oracle ceased development of OpenOffice.org and disbanded the remaining Star Division team. The reasons were not publicly disclosed, but speculation points to community migration to LibreOffice and commercial considerations.
- By June 2011, Oracle announced it would no longer offer a commercial version of OpenOffice. They contributed the OpenOffice.org trademarks and source code to the Apache Software Foundation, which re-licensed it under the Apache License.
- The project joined the Apache Incubator on June 13, 2011. Oracle’s code drop was imported on August 29, 2011. Apache OpenOffice 3.4 was released on May 8, 2012, and the project became a top-level Apache project on October 18, 2012.
- By December 2011, the project was referred to as Apache OpenOffice.org (Incubating). In 2012, the name Apache OpenOffice was officially adopted.
- LibreOffice is a free and open-source office suite developed by The Document Foundation, forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010.
- The LibreOffice beta was announced on September 28, 2010. Between January 2011 (first stable release) and October 2011, it was downloaded approximately 7.5 million times. From May 2011 to May 2015, LibreOffice recorded 120 million unique downloads, with 55 million occurring between May 2014 and May 2015, excluding Linux distributions.
This refined content provides a clear, chronological understanding of the transition from OpenOffice to LibreOffice and their development milestones.
