Skip links

10 Interesting facts about OpenOffice

1. OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. It was an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice.

2. In August 1999, Star Division was acquired by Sun Microsystems for US $59.5 million, as it was supposedly cheaper than licensing Microsoft Office for 42,000 staff.

3. Sun open-sourced the OpenOffice in July 2000 as a competitor to Microsoft Office, releasing version 1.0 on 1 May 2002.

4. After acquiring Sun Microsystems in January 2010, Oracle Corporation continued developing OpenOffice.org and StarOffice which it renamed Oracle Open Office. In September 2010, the majority of outside OpenOffice.org developers left the project due to concerns over Sun’s, and then Oracle’s, management of the project to form The Document Foundation (TDF). TDF released the fork LibreOffice in January 2011 which most Linux distributions soon moved to including Oracle Linux in 2012.

5. In April 2011, Oracle stopped development of OpenOffice.org and fired the remaining Star Division development team. Its reasons for doing so were not disclosed; some speculate that it was due to the loss of mindshare with much of the community moving to LibreOffice while others suggest it was a commercial decision.

6. In June 2011 Oracle Corporation, the then-owner of Sun, announced that it would no longer offer a commercial version of the suite. Oracle contributed the OpenOffice.org trademarks and source code to the Apache Software Foundation which Apache re-licensed under the Apache License.

7. The project was accepted to the Apache Incubator on 13 June 2011. The Oracle code drop was imported on 29 August 2011. Apache OpenOffice 3.4 was released 8 May 2012 and Apache OpenOffice graduated as a top-level Apache project on 18 October 2012.

8. By December 2011, the project was being called Apache OpenOffice.org (Incubating). In 2012, the project chose the name Apache OpenOffice, a name used in the 3.4 press release.

9. LibreOffice is a free and open-source office suite, a project of The Document Foundation. It was forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010, which was an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice.

10. The project was announced and a beta released on 28 September 2010. Between January 2011 (the first stable release) and October 2011, LibreOffice was downloaded approximately 7.5 million times. The project claims 120 million unique downloading addresses from May 2011 to May 2015, excluding Linux distributions, with 55 million of those being from May 2014 to May 2015.

Back

Contact Us

    Return to top of page