Its source code continues today in derived open-source office suites Collabora Online and LibreOffice.

The software originated in 1985 as StarWriter by Star Division, which marketed the suite with some success, primarily in Europe.

StarOffice was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999, which released the source code the following year as a free and open source office suite called OpenOffice.org, which subsequent versions of StarOffice were based on, with additional proprietary components.

Later, the integration of the other individual programs followed as the development progressed to an office suite for DOS, IBM's OS/2 Warp, and for the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Until version 4.2, Star Division based StarOffice on the cross-platform C++ class library StarView.

Sun Microsystems acquired the company, copyright and trademark of StarOffice in 1999 for US$73.5 million,[9] as it was supposedly cheaper than 42,000 licenses of Microsoft Office.

It also included additional fonts for the East Asian market, resulting in slightly larger installation footprint.

Caldera, Inc. supported the Linux-port of StarOffice 3.1 with approximately 800,000 DM in order to offer the product with their forthcoming OpenLinux distribution in 1997.

[25][26][27][28] Supported platforms included Windows 3.1/95, OS/2, Linux i386, Solaris Sparc/x86, Mac OS (beta).

The resultant free/open source software codebase fork continued development as older discontinued components, with contributions from both Sun and the wider OpenOffice.org community.

OpenOffice.org version also supports generic Linux with Glibc 2.2.0, Mac OS X 10.2 for PowerPC with X11 in OOO 1.1.2.

New features included improved input and sorting in Calc, block markings in text documents, new import filtering, improved security, access to WebDAV servers via HTTPS, and PDF export for long-term archiving.

Sun released StarOffice 8 (based on the code of OpenOffice.org 2.0) on 27 September 2005,[35] adding support for the OpenDocument standard and a number of improvements.

[36] Supported platforms include Windows 98/2000 (Service Pack 2 or higher), Linux i386, Solaris 8 Sparc/x86.

New features include improved input and sorting in Calc, block markings in text documents, new import filter, improved security, access to WebDAV servers via HTTPS, PDF export for long-term archiving.

StarOffice 9, released 17 November 2008,[37] added support for version 1.2 of the OpenDocument standard and Microsoft Office 2007 files and a number of other improvements.

OOO version supports Mac OS X PowerPC, generic Linux platforms.

Sun also offered free web-based training and an online tutorial for students and teachers, free support services for teachers (including educational templates for StarOffice) and significantly discounted technical support for schools.

[45][46][47] OpenOffice.org was open source, and gave rise to many derivative versions and successor projects to StarOffice.