StarOffice. Originally developed by a German company, StarOffice was
purchased by Sun Microsystems in the United States. One of the biggest
complaints about the old StarOffice was that all the component applications
were integrated under a StarOffice “desktop” that looked very much like a
Microsoft Windows desktop, including a Start button and menus. This
meant that to edit a simple document, unneeded applications had to be
loaded, making the office suite slow to load, slow to run, and quite
demanding on system resources.
After the purchase of StarOffice, Sun Microsystems released a large part of
the StarOffice code under the GNU General Public License, and
development began on what has become OpenOffice.org, which was freely
available under the GPL. Sun also continued development on StarOffice.
The significant differences between the free and commercial versions of the
software were that StarOffice provided more fonts and even more
import/export file filters than OpenOffice.org (these filters were not
provided in the GPL version because of licensing restrictions), and
StarOffice provided its own relational database, Software AG’s Adabas D
database.
Sun was bought by Oracle. Oracle suffered from a major disagreement with
the developer community surrounding OpenOffice.org, and the developers
left to form The Document Foundation, hoping that Oracle would
eventually join. Because the code for OpenOffice.org was licensed using a
free software license, The Document Foundation created a fork, or a new
version of the same software, using what they intended as a temporary
name, LibreOffice. The hope was merely to change how the project was
governed, from being led by one company to being led by a community
with many companies and individuals participating. Oracle chose not to
join The Document Foundation and instead relicensed the OpenOffice.org
code for all future versions, which it may do as the owner of that code, and
gave the code to the Apache Software Foundation, which is licensing it
under the less-restrictive Apache license that allows open source code to be
used in proprietary products. To make things more interesting, IBM is
using this Apache-licensed version of OpenOffice.org as the foundation for
its own free (in terms of cost) office suite based on it, called Lotus
Symphony, which also has some proprietary additions.As the saga continues, the ultimate winner may be the end user as there are
now effectively three competing office suites. For now, LibreOffice has the
most developers, the strongest community, and the most mature software
with the most rapid addition of new or improved features.