In 2011, Oracle Corporation, the then-owner of Sun, announced that it would no longer offer a commercial version of the suite[17] and donated the project to the Apache Foundation.

[13] OpenOffice.org originated as StarOffice, a proprietary office suite developed by German company Star Division from 1985 on.

In August 1999, Star Division was acquired by Sun Microsystems[20][21] for US$59.5 million,[22] as it was supposedly cheaper than licensing Microsoft Office for 42,000 staff.

[23] On 19 July 2000 at OSCON, Sun Microsystems announced it would make the source code of StarOffice available for download with the intention of building an open-source development community around the software and of providing a free and open alternative to Microsoft Office.

It quickly became noteworthy competition to Microsoft Office,[27][28] achieving 14% penetration in the large enterprise market by 2004.

[35][58] 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[59] while others suggest it was a commercial decision.

The Community Council suggested project goals and coordinated with producers of derivatives on long-term development planning issues.

[71] The project and software were informally referred to as OpenOffice since the Sun release, but since this term is a trademark held by Open Office Automatisering in Benelux since 1999,[72][73] OpenOffice.org was its formal name.

[76]) OpenOffice.org 1.0 was launched under the following mission statement:[15] The mission of OpenOffice.org is to create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.The suite contained no personal information manager, email client or calendar application analogous to Microsoft Outlook, despite one having been present in StarOffice 5.2.

Starting with version 2.0, OpenOffice.org used native widget toolkit, icons, and font-rendering libraries on GNOME, KDE and Windows.

[117] The issue came to the fore in May 2005, when Richard Stallman appeared to call for a fork of the application in a posting on the Free Software Foundation website.

[147] Work on version 2.0 began in early 2003 with the following goals (the "Q Product Concept"): better interoperability with Microsoft Office; improved speed and lower memory usage; greater scripting capabilities; better integration, particularly with GNOME; a more usable database; digital signatures; and improved usability.

[149] On 2 September 2005, Sun announced that it was retiring SISSL to reduce license proliferation,[150] though some press analysts felt it was so that IBM could not reuse OpenOffice.org code without contributing back.

[152][153][154][155][156][157][158][159] A PC Pro review awarded it 6 stars out of 6 and stated: "Our pick of the low-cost office suites has had a much-needed overhaul, and now battles Microsoft in terms of features, not just price.

Computerworld reported that for large government departments, migration to OpenOffice.org 2.0 cost one tenth of the price of upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007.

[162] On 13 October 2008, version 3.0 was released, featuring the ability to import (though not export) Office Open XML documents, support for ODF 1.2, improved VBA macros, and a native interface port for OS X.

[42][168] A beta version of OpenOffice.org 3.4 was released on 12 April 2011, including new SVG import, improved ODF 1.2 support, and spreadsheet functionality.

The project tried to capture key adoption data in a market-share analysis,[170] listing known distribution totals, known deployments and conversions and analyst statements and surveys.

[171] A market-share analysis conducted by a web analytics service in 2010, based on over 200,000 Internet users, showed a wide range of adoption in different countries:[172] 0.2% in China, 9% in the US and the UK and over 20% in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany.

Although Microsoft Office retained 95% of the general market — as measured by revenue — as of August 2007,[173] OpenOffice.org and StarOffice had secured 15–20% of the business market as of 2004[174][175] and a 2010 University of Colorado at Boulder study reported that OpenOffice.org had reached a point where it had an "irreversible" installed user base and that it would continue to grow.

[170] In India, several government organizations such as Employees' State Insurance, IIT Bombay, National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, the Supreme Court of India, ICICI Bank,[182] and the Allahabad High Court,[183] which use Linux, completely relied on OpenOffice.org for their administration.

In Japan, conversions from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org included many municipal offices: Sumoto, Hyōgo in 2004,[184] Ninomiya, Tochigi in 2006,[185][186] Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima in 2008[187] (and to LibreOffice as of 2012[188]), Shikokuchūō, Ehime in 2009,[189] Minoh, Osaka in 2009[190] Toyokawa, Aichi,[191] Fukagawa, Hokkaido[192] and Katano, Osaka[193] in 2010 and Ryūgasaki, Ibaraki in 2011.

[199][201] In July 2007, Everex, a division of First International Computer and the 9th-largest PC supplier in the U.S., began shipping systems preloaded with OpenOffice.org 2.2 into Wal-Mart, K-mart and Sam's Club outlets in North America.

[221] Major derivatives include: In June 2011, Oracle contributed the OpenOffice.org code and trademarks to the Apache Software Foundation.

The developer pool for the Apache project was proposed to be seeded by IBM employees, Linux distribution companies and public sector agencies.

[238] After ongoing problems with unfixed security vulnerabilities from 2015 onward,[239][240][241] in September 2016 the project started discussions on possibly retiring AOO.

[243] Sun had stated in the original OpenOffice.org announcement in 2000 that the project would be run by a neutral foundation,[14] and put forward a more detailed proposal in 2001.

[258] NeoOffice, an independent commercial port for Macintosh that tracked the main line of development, offered a native OS X Aqua user interface before OpenOffice.org did.

[262] The ooo-build patch set was started at Ximian in 2002, because Sun was slow to accept outside work on OpenOffice.org, even from corporate partners, and to make the build process easier on Linux.

[37] Many free software advocates worried that Go-oo was a Novell effort to incorporate Microsoft technologies, such as Office Open XML, that might be vulnerable to patent claims.