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We aren’t open source lawyers - or any kind of lawyers, for that matter - but one of the problems stems from how the two projects have their licenses. They have had 13 major releases, while OpenOffice hasn’t had a major release in six years.

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According to the LibreOffice letter, they’ve had 15,000 code commits in 2019 compared to 595 in OpenOffice over the same period. LibreOffice has been under very active development since then, and most Linux distributions now use it as their default office suite. When Oracle came on the scene, most of the OpenOffice developers formed LibreOffice. The timeline is a bit of a head scratcher but Wikipedia has this great graphic that lays it out: While there have been several notable forks including NeoOffice and Go-oo, only LibreOffice has really been robust, even though NeoOffice and the original OpenOffice are still active. Of course, once the code went open source around 2000, people were free to create derivative projects and they did.

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They gave responsibility over to the Apache Software Foundation.Īpparently, though, StarOffice 5.1 will still run on Windows 10 as demonstrates in the following video: In 2011, Oracle decided to kill the commercial offering, leaving OpenOffice, the official community-based keeper for the StarOffice flame. For example, StarOffice 9 was no longer free for educational customers, but they could use StarOffice 8 or, of course, just stick with OpenOffice and forego support. They also did strange things with licensing. They renamed the program Oracle Open Office. They didn’t seem to have much of a plan for some of the things they bought and StarOffice was one of them. A couple of years later, StarOffice 8/OpenOffice 2.0 appeared and by 2008, we had StarOffice 9 with OpenOffice 3.0 just before Oracle entered the picture. In 2003, release 1.1 turned into StarOffice 7.

StarOffice 6.0 corresponded to OpenOffice 1.0. This was the state of affairs for a while. Sun contributed to the project and would periodically snapshot the code to market future versions of StarOffice.

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It eventually released much of the code under an open source license producing OpenOffice.

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Sun provided StarOffice 5.2 in 2000 as a free download for personal use, which gave the software a lot of attention. The story was that it was still cheaper than buying a license for each Sun employee, particularly since most had both a Windows machine and a Unix machine which still required some capability. We don’t mean they bought a copy or a license, they bought the entire thing for just under $74 million. The program was far less expensive than most competitors, costing about $70, yet in 1999 that price point prompted Sun Microsystems to buy StarOffice. Eventually, the company added other office suite programs and with support for DOS, OS/2, and Windows, the suite became known as StarOffice. By 1986, he created a company, Star Division, porting the word processor to platforms like CP/M and MSDOS. It all started when German Marco Börries wrote StarWriter in 1985 for the Zilog Z80.

But it did get us thinking about how things got here. We could argue that case either way, but we won’t. LibreOffice, on the other hand, is a very active project. Their logic is that OpenOffice has huge name recognition, but hasn’t had a new major release in several years. However, the LibreOffice team recently penned an open letter to the Apache project - the current keepers of OpenOffice - asking them to redirect new users to the LibreOffice project. That isn’t surprising since they both started with exactly the same code base. When it comes to open source office suites, most people choose OpenOffice or LibreOffice, and they both look suspiciously similar.

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