subject: Cheap Microsoft Office [print this page] OpenOffice.org originated as StarOffice, an office suite developed by StarDivision and acquired by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. The source code of the suite was released in July 2000 with the aim of reducing the dominant market share of Microsoft Office by providing a free and open alternative; later versions of StarOffice are based upon OpenOffice.org with additional proprietary components. The OpenOffice.org project is primarily sponsored by Oracle Corporation (initially by Sun Microsystems). Other major corporate contributors include Novell, RedHat, RedFlag CH2000, IBM, Google and others.
The project and software are commonly known as OpenOffice, but this term is a trademark held by a company in the Netherlands co-founded by Wouter Hanegraaff and is also in use by Orange UK, requiring the project to adopt OpenOffice.org as its formal name. Although branded as OpenOffice.org, the office suite included in most Linux distributions (including Ubuntu, openSUSE and Mandriva Linux) is actually a fork or an unofficial branch called Go-oo.
