OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

office suite Productivity software (also called personal productivity software or office productivity software) is application software used for producing information (such as documents, presentations, worksheets, databases, charts, graphs, digital painting ...

. Active successor projects include

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite consi ...

(the most actively developed),

Apache OpenOffice Apache OpenOffice (AOO) is an open-source office productivity software suite. It is one of the successor projects of OpenOffice.org and the designated successor of IBM Lotus Symphony. It is a close cousin of LibreOffice, Collabora Online an ...

Collabora Online Collabora Online is an open source online office suite that can be integrated with any web application, it is developed by Collabora Productivity, a division of Collabora. Collabora Online has LibreOffice at its core and allows for collaborativ ...

(enterprise ready LibreOffice) and NeoOffice (commercial, and available only for macOS). OpenOffice was an open-sourced version of the earlier

StarOffice StarOffice is a discontinued proprietary office suite, intended to compete with the marketing-leading Microsoft Office. It served as the basis for open-source suites OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. StarOffice supported the OpenOffice.org XML fi ...

, which

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

acquired in 1999 for internal use. Sun open-sourced the OpenOffice suite in July 2000 as a competitor to

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a ma ...

, releasing version 1.0 on 1 May 2002. OpenOffice included a

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Word processor (electronic device), Early word processors were stand-alone devices ded ...

(Writer), a

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in ce ...

(Calc), a

presentation A presentation conveys information from a speaker to an audience. Presentations are typically demonstrations, introduction, lecture, or speech meant to inform, persuade, inspire, motivate, build goodwill, or present a new idea/product. Present ...

application (Impress), a

drawing Drawing is a visual art that uses an instrument to mark paper or another two-dimensional surface. The instruments used to make a drawing are pencils, crayons, pens with inks, brushes with paints, or combinations of these, and in more mod ...

application (Draw), a

formula editor A formula editor is a computer program that is used to typeset mathematical formulas and mathematical expressions. Formula editors typically serve two purposes: * They allow word processing and publication of technical content either for prin ...

(Math), and a

database management In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...

application (Base). Its default

file format A file format is a Computer standard, standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary format, pr ...

was the

OpenDocument The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, is an open file format for word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and graphics and using ZIP-compressed XML files. It was developed ...

Format (ODF), an ISO/ IEC standard, which originated with OpenOffice.org. It could also read a wide variety of other file formats, with particular attention to those from Microsoft Office. OpenOffice.org was primarily developed for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

, Microsoft Windows and Solaris, and later for

OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

, with ports to other

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s. It was distributed under the

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

version 3 (LGPL); early versions were also available under the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). In 2011,

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

, the then-owner of Sun, announced that it would no longer offer a commercial version of the suite and donated the project to the

Apache Foundation The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the Ap ...

. Apache renamed the software

History

OpenOffice.org originated as

, a proprietary office suite developed by German company

Star Division The German software company Star Division (also written Star-Division) was founded in 1985 by the 16-year-old Marco Börries in Lüneburg as a garage company. After a neighbour denounced the operation of a business in a residential area to the ...

from 1985 on. In August 1999, Star Division was acquired by

for US$59.5 million, as it was supposedly cheaper than licensing

for 42,000 staff. 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. The new project was known as OpenOffice.org, and the code was released as open source on 13 October 2000. The first public preview release was Milestone Build 638c, released in October 2001 (which quickly achieved 1 million downloads); the final release of OpenOffice.org 1.0 was on 1 May 2002. OpenOffice.org became the standard office suite on many Linux distros and spawned many derivative versions. It quickly became noteworthy competition to Microsoft Office, achieving 14% penetration in the large enterprise market by 2004. The OpenOffice.org XML file format –

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. ...

in a

ZIP Zip, Zips or ZIP may refer to: Common uses * ZIP Code, USPS postal code * Zipper or zip, clothing fastener Science and technology Computing * ZIP (file format), a compressed archive file format ** zip, a command-line program from Info-ZIP * Zi ...

archive, easily machine-processable – was intended by Sun to become a standard interchange format for office documents, to replace the different binary formats for each application that had been usual until then. Sun submitted the format to the

Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS; ) is a nonprofit consortium that works on the development, convergence, and adoption of open standards for cybersecurity, blockchain, Internet of things (IoT), emer ...

(OASIS) in 2002 and it was adapted to form the

standard in 2005, which was ratified as ISO 26300 in 2006. It was made OpenOffice.org's native format from version 2 on. Many governments and other organisations adopted OpenDocument, particularly given there was a free implementation of it readily available. Development of OpenOffice.org was sponsored primarily by Sun Microsystems, which used the code as the basis for subsequent versions of StarOffice. Developers who wished to contribute code were required to sign a Contributor Agreement granting joint ownership of any contributions to Sun (and then Oracle), in support of the StarOffice business model. This was controversial for many years. An alternative Public Documentation Licence (PDL) was also offered for documentation not intended for inclusion or integration into the project code base. After acquiring Sun in January 2010,

continued developing OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, which it renamed Oracle Open Office, though with a reduction in assigned developers. Oracle's lack of activity on or visible commitment to OpenOffice.org had also been noted by industry observers. In September 2010, the majority of outside OpenOffice.org developers left the project, due to concerns over Sun and then Oracle's management of the project and Oracle's handling of its open source portfolio in general, to form

The Document Foundation The Document Foundation (TDF) is a non-profit organization that promotes open-source document handling software. It was created by members of the OpenOffice.org community to manage and develop LibreOffice, a free and open-source office suite, an ...

(TDF). TDF released the

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca ' pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods ...

in January 2011, which most

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading on ...

s soon moved to. In April 2011, Oracle stopped development of OpenOffice.org and fired the remaining Star Division development team. 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 while others suggest it was a commercial decision. In June 2011, Oracle contributed the trademarks to the Apache Software Foundation.
Oracle blog version
It also contributed Oracle-owned code to Apache for relicensing under the Apache License, at the suggestion of IBM (to whom Oracle had contractual obligations concerning the code), as IBM did not want the code put under a

copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...

license. This code drop formed the basis for the

project.

Governance

During Sun's sponsorship, the OpenOffice.org project was governed by the ''Community Council'', comprising OpenOffice.org community members. The Community Council suggested project goals and coordinated with producers of derivatives on long-term development planning issues. Both Sun and Oracle are claimed to have made decisions without consulting the Council or in contravention to the council's recommendations, leading to the majority of outside developers leaving for LibreOffice. Oracle demanded in October 2010 that all Council members involved with the Document Foundation step down, leaving the Community Council composed only of Oracle employees.

Naming

The project and software were informally referred to as ''OpenOffice'' since the Sun release, but since this term is a

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from oth ...

held by Open Office Automatisering in

Benelux The Benelux Union ( nl, Benelux Unie; french: Union Benelux; lb, Benelux-Unioun), also known as simply Benelux, is a Political union, politico-economic union and formal international intergovernmental cooperation of three neighboring states in ...

since 1999, ''OpenOffice.org'' was its formal name. Due to a similar trademark issue (a

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro ( , , ; literally 'River of January'), or simply Rio, is the capital of the Rio de Janeiro (state), state of the same name, Brazil's List of Brazilian states by population, third-most populous state, and the List of largest citi ...

company that owned that trademark in Brazil), the

Brazilian Portuguese Brazilian Portuguese (' ), also Portuguese of Brazil (', ) or South American Portuguese (') is the set of varieties of the Portuguese language native to Brazil and the most influential form of Portuguese worldwide. It is spoken by almost all of ...

version of the suite was distributed under the name BrOffice.org from 2004, with BrOffice.Org being the name of the associated local nonprofit from 2006. (BrOffice.org moved to LibreOffice in December 2010.)

Features

OpenOffice.org 1.0 was launched under the following

mission statement A mission statement is a short statement of why an organization exists, what its overall goal is, the goal of its operations: what kind of product or service it provides, its primary customers or market, and its geographical region of operatio ...

Components

The suite contained no

personal information manager A personal information manager (often referred to as a PIM tool or, more simply, a PIM) is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. The acronym PIM is now, more commonly, used in reference to personal information manag ...

email client An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...

or calendar application analogous to

Microsoft Outlook Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager software system from Microsoft, available as a part of the Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 software suites. Though primarily an email client, Outlook also includes such functions as c ...

, despite one having been present in StarOffice 5.2. Such functionality was frequently requested. The OpenOffice.org Groupware project, intended to replace Outlook and

Microsoft Exchange Server Microsoft Exchange Server is a mail server and calendaring server developed by Microsoft. It runs exclusively on Windows Server operating systems. The first version was called Exchange Server 4.0, to position it as the successor to the related ...

, spun off in 2003 as OpenGroupware.org, which is now SOGo. The project considered bundling

Mozilla Thunderbird Mozilla Thunderbird is a free and open-source cross-platform email client, personal information manager, news client, RSS and chat client developed by the Mozilla Foundation and operated by subsidiary MZLA Technologies Corporation. The projec ...

and Mozilla Lightning for OpenOffice.org 3.0.

Supported operating systems

The last version, 3.4 Beta 1, was available for

IA-32 IA-32 (short for "Intel Architecture, 32-bit", commonly called i386) is the 32-bit version of the x86 instruction set architecture, designed by Intel and first implemented in the 80386 microprocessor in 1985. IA-32 is the first incarnation of ...

versions of

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and was official ...

Service Pack 2 or later,

(IA-32 and x64), Solaris and

10.4 or later, and the

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed ...

version of Solaris. The latest versions of OpenOffice.org on other operating systems were: *

IRIX IRIX ( ) is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. In IRIX, SGI originated the XFS file system ...

( MIPS IV): v1.0.3 * Linux 2.2: v2.x *

Linux 2.4 The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ope ...

: v3.3.x * Mac OS X v10.2: v1.1.2 * Mac OS X v10.3: v2.1 * Mac OS X v10.4- Mac OS X v10.6: v4.0 *

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufactu ...

: v1.1.5 * Windows NT 4.0 SP6: v1.1.x *

Windows 98 Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. The second operating system in the 9x line, it is the successor to Windows 95, and was released ...

and

Windows ME Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows Me (marketed with the pronunciation of the pronoun "me"), is an operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is the successor to Win ...

: v2.4.3 *

Service Pack 2 or later: v3.3.x * Solaris 7: 1.0.x * Solaris 8, Solaris 9: v2.x * Solaris 10: v3.4 Beta 1

Fonts

OpenOffice.org included OpenSymbol,

DejaVu The DejaVu fonts are a superfamily of fonts designed for broad coverage of the Unicode Universal Character Set. The fonts are derived from Bitstream Vera (sans-serif) and Bitstream Charter (serif), two fonts released by Bitstream under a fre ...

, the

Liberation fonts Liberation is the collective name of four TrueType font families: ''Liberation Sans'', ''Liberation Sans Narrow'', ''Liberation Serif'', and ''Liberation Mono''. These fonts are metrically compatible with the most popular fonts on the Microso ...

(from 2.4) and the

Gentium Gentium (, from the Latin for "of the nations") is a Unicode serif typeface designed by Victor Gaultney. Gentium fonts are free software, free and Open-source software, open source software, and are released under the SIL Open Font License (OFL), ...

fonts (from 3.2). Versions up to 2.3 included the Bitstream Vera fonts. OpenOffice.org also used the default fonts of the running operating system. ''Fontwork'' is a feature that allows users to create stylized text with special effects differing from ordinary text with the added features of gradient colour fills, shaping, letter height, and character spacing. It is similar to WordArt used by Microsoft Word. When OpenOffice.org saved documents in Microsoft Office file format, all Fontwork was converted into WordArt.

Extensions

From version 2.0.4, OpenOffice.org supported third-party extensions. As of April 2011, the OpenOffice Extension Repository listed more than 650 extensions. Another list was maintained by the

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft ("s ...

OpenOffice Basic

OpenOffice.org included OpenOffice Basic, a

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming l ...

similar to Microsoft

Visual Basic for Applications Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is an implementation of Microsoft's event-driven programming language Visual Basic 6.0 built into most desktop Microsoft Office applications. Although based on pre-.NET Visual Basic, which is no longer supporte ...

(VBA). OpenOffice Basic was available in Writer, Calc and Base. OpenOffice.org also had some Microsoft VBA macro support.

Connectivity

OpenOffice.org could interact with databases (local or remote) using ODBC (

Open Database Connectivity In computing, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing database management systems (DBMS). The designers of ODBC aimed to make it independent of database systems and operating systems. A ...

), JDBC (

Java Database Connectivity Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is an application programming interface (API) for the programming language Java, which defines how a client may access a database. It is a Java-based data access technology used for Java database connectivity. ...

) or SDBC (StarOffice Database Connectivity).

File formats

From Version 2.0 onward, OpenOffice.org used ISO/IEC 26300:2006

as its native format. Versions 2.0–2.3.0 default to the ODF 1.0 file format; versions 2.3.1–2.4.3 default to ODF 1.1; versions 3.0 onward default to ODF 1.2. OpenOffice.org 1 used OpenOffice.org XML as its native format. This was contributed to

OASIS In ecology, an oasis (; ) is a fertile area of a desert or semi-desert environment

Development

OpenOffice.org converted all external formats to and from an internal XML representation. The OpenOffice.org API was based on a component technology known as Universal Network Objects (UNO). It consisted of a wide range of interfaces defined in a

CORBA The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to facilitate the communication of systems that are deployed on diverse platforms. CORBA enables collaboration between sy ...

-like

interface description language interface description language or interface definition language (IDL), is a generic term for a language that lets a program or object written in one language communicate with another program written in an unknown language. IDLs describe an inter ...

Native desktop integration

OpenOffice.org 1.0 was criticized for not having the

look and feel In software design, the look and feel of a graphical user interface comprises aspects of its design, including elements such as colors, shapes, layout, and typefaces (the "look"), as well as the behavior of dynamic elements such as buttons, box ...

of applications developed natively for the platforms on which it runs. Starting with version 2.0, OpenOffice.org used native

widget toolkit A widget toolkit, widget library, GUI toolkit, or UX library is a library or a collection of libraries containing a set of graphical control elements (called ''widgets'') used to construct the graphical user interface (GUI) of programs. Most wid ...

, icons, and font-rendering libraries on GNOME,

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...

and Windows. The issue had been particularly pronounced on Mac OS X. Early versions of OpenOffice.org required the installation of X11.app or XDarwin (though the NeoOffice port supplied a native interface). Versions since 3.0 ran natively using Apple's Aqua GUI.

Use of Java

Although originally written in C++, OpenOffice.org became increasingly reliant on the Java Runtime Environment, even including a bundled JVM. OpenOffice.org was criticized by the Free Software Foundation for its increasing dependency on Java, which was not

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

. The issue came to the fore in May 2005, when

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to u ...

appeared to call for a fork of the application in a posting on the Free Software Foundation website. OpenOffice.org adopted a development guideline that future versions of OpenOffice.org would run on free implementations of Java and fixed the issues which previously prevented OpenOffice.org 2.0 from using free-software Java implementations. On 13 November 2006, Sun committed to releasing Java under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

and had released a free software Java,

OpenJDK OpenJDK (Open Java Development Kit) is a free and open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE). It is the result of an effort Sun Microsystems began in 2006. The implementation is licensed under the GPL-2.0-only ...

, by May 2007.

Security

In 2006, Lt. Col. Eric Filiol of the Laboratoire de Virologie et de Cryptologie de l'ESAT demonstrated security weaknesses, in particular within macros. In 2006,

Kaspersky Lab Kaspersky Lab (; Russian language, Russian: Лаборатория Касперского, Romanization of Russian, tr. ''Laboratoriya Kasperskogo'') is a Russian Multinational corporation, multinational cybersecurity and anti-virus provider head ...

demonstrated a

proof of concept Proof of concept (POC or PoC), also known as proof of principle, is a realization of a certain method or idea in order to demonstrate its feasibility, or a demonstration in principle with the aim of verifying that some concept or theory has prac ...

virus, "Stardust", for OpenOffice.org. This showed OpenOffice.org viruses are possible, but there is no known virus "in the wild". As of October 2011, Secunia reported no known unpatched security flaws for the software. A vulnerability in the inherited OpenOffice.org codebase was found and fixed in LibreOffice in October 2011 and Apache OpenOffice in May 2012.

Version history

OpenOffice.org 1

The preview, Milestone 638c, was released October 2001. OpenOffice.org 1.0 was released under both the LGPL and the SISSL for Windows, Linux and Solaris on 1 May 2002. The version for Mac OS X (with X11 interface) was released on 23 June 2003. OpenOffice.org 1.1 introduced One-click Export to PDF, Export presentations to Flash (.SWF) and

macro Macro (or MACRO) may refer to: Science and technology * Macroscopic, subjects visible to the eye * Macro photography, a type of close-up photography * Image macro, a picture with text superimposed * Monopole, Astrophysics and Cosmic Ray Observat ...

recording. It also allowed third-party addons. OpenOffice.org was used in 2005 by ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide ...

'' to illustrate what it saw as the limitations of open-source software.

OpenOffice.org 2

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 Script may refer to: Writing systems * Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire * Script (styles of handwriting) ** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of handw ...

capabilities; better integration, particularly with GNOME; a more usable database; digital signatures; and improved

usability Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a sof ...

. It would also be the first version to default to OpenDocument. Sun released the first

beta version A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impr ...

on 4 March 2005. On 2 September 2005, Sun announced that it was retiring SISSL to reduce

license proliferation License proliferation is the phenomenon of an abundance of already existing and the continued creation of new software licenses for software and software packages in the FOSS ecosystem. License proliferation affects the whole FOSS ecosystem n ...

, though some press analysts felt it was so that IBM could not reuse OpenOffice.org code without contributing back. Versions after 2.0 beta 2 would use only the LGPL. On 20 October 2005, OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released. 2.0.1 was released eight weeks later, fixing minor bugs and introducing new features. As of the 2.0.3 release, OpenOffice.org changed its release cycle from 18 months to releasing updates every three months. The OpenOffice.org 2 series attracted considerable press attention. 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." ''

Federal Computer Week ''FCW'' (launched as ''Federal Computer Week'') is a news website that covers U.S. federal government technology and occasionally state, local, tribal and international governments. It is owned by GovExec. ''FCW'' was established in 1987 by Interna ...

'' listed OpenOffice.org as one of the "5 stars of open-source products", noting in particular the importance of OpenDocument. ''

Computerworld ''Computerworld'' (abbreviated as CW) is an ongoing decades old professional publication which in 2014 "went digital." Its audience is information technology (IT) and business technology professionals, and is available via a publication website ...

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

Microsoft Office 2007 Microsoft Office 2007 (codenamed Office 12) is an office suite for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was officially revealed on March 9, 2006 and was the 12th version of Microsoft Office. It was released to manufacturing on Nove ...

OpenOffice.org 3

On 13 October 2008, version 3.0 was released, featuring the ability to import (though not export)

Office Open XML Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML) is a zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Ecma International standardized the initial versi ...

documents, support for ODF 1.2, improved VBA macros, and a native interface port for OS X. It also introduced the new Start Center and upgraded to LGPL version 3 as its license. Version 3.2 included support for PostScript-based

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...

fonts. It warned users when ODF 1.2 Extended features had been used. An improvement to the document integrity check determined if an ODF document conformed to the ODF specification and offered a repair if necessary. Calc and Writer both reduced "cold start" time by 46% compared to version 3.0. 3.2.1 was the first Oracle release. Version 3.3, the last Oracle version, was released in January 2011. New features include an updated print form, a FindBar and interface improvements for Impress. The commercial version, Oracle Open Office 3.3 (StarOffice renamed), based on the beta, was released on 15 December 2010, as was the single release of Oracle Cloud Office (a proprietary product from an unrelated codebase).

OpenOffice.org 3.4 Beta 1

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. Before the final version of OpenOffice.org 3.4 could be released, Oracle cancelled its sponsorship of development and fired the remaining Star Division development team.

Market share

Problems arise in estimating the market share of OpenOffice.org because it could be freely distributed via download sites (including mirror sites), peer-to-peer networks, CDs, Linux distributions and so forth. The project tried to capture key adoption data in a market-share analysis, listing known distribution totals, known deployments and conversions and analyst statements and surveys. According to

Valve A valve is a device or natural object that regulates, directs or controls the flow of a fluid (gases, liquids, fluidized solids, or slurries) by opening, closing, or partially obstructing various passageways. Valves are technically fitting ...

, as of July 2010, 14.63% of

Steam Steam is a substance containing water in the gas phase, and sometimes also an aerosol of liquid water droplets, or air. This may occur due to evaporation or due to boiling, where heat is applied until water reaches the enthalpy of vaporizat ...

users had OpenOffice.org installed on their machines. A market-share analysis conducted by a

web analytics Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of web data to understand and optimize web usage. Web analytics is not just a process for measuring web traffic but can be used as a tool for business and market research a ...

service in 2010, based on over 200,000 Internet users, showed a wide range of adoption in different countries: 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, OpenOffice.org and StarOffice had secured 15–20% of the business market as of 2004 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. The project claimed more than 98 million downloads as of September 2007 and 300 million total to the release of version 3.2 in February 2010. The project claimed over one hundred million downloads for the OpenOffice.org 3 series within a year of release.

Notable users

Large-scale users of OpenOffice.org included Singapore's Ministry of Defence, and

Banco do Brasil Banco do Brasil S.A. ( en, Bank of Brazil) is a Brazilian financial services company headquartered in Brasília, Brazil. The oldest bank in Brazil, and among the oldest banks in continuous operation in the world, it was founded by John VI, King ...

. OpenOffice.org was the official office suite for the

French Gendarmerie The National Gendarmerie (french: Gendarmerie nationale, ) is one of two national law enforcement forces of France, along with the National Police. The Gendarmerie is a branch of the French Armed Forces placed under the jurisdiction of the Minis ...

. In

India India, officially the Republic of India ( Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the ...

, several government organizations such as ESIC,

IIT Bombay The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay or IITB) is a public research university and technical institute in Powai, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. It is considered as one of the best engineering universities in India and is top rank ...

National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) is an apex regulatory body for overall regulation of regional rural banks and apex cooperative banks in India. It is under the jurisdiction of Ministry of Finance, Government of Ind ...

, the

Supreme Court of India The Supreme Court of India (IAST: ) is the supreme judicial authority of India and is the highest court of the Republic of India under the constitution. It is the most senior constitutional court, has the final decision in all legal matters ...

ICICI Bank ICICI Bank Limited is an Indian Private bank. It is headquartered at Mumbai. It offers a wide range of banking products and financial services for corporate and retail customers through a variety of delivery channels and specialized subsidiari ...

, and the

Allahabad High Court Allahabad High Court, also known as High Court of Judicature at Allahabad is the high court based in Prayagraj that has jurisdiction over the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. It was established on 17 March 1866, making it one of the oldest hig ...

, 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 270px, Sumoto City Hall 270px, Sumoto Castle is a city located on Awaji Island, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 42,094 and a population density of 230 persons per km².The total area of the city is . Geogra ...

in 2004,

Ninomiya, Tochigi was a town located in Haga District, lying in the extreme south-east of Tochigi Prefecture, Japan. As of 2006, the town had an estimated population of 16,765 and a density of 300.52 persons per km2. The total area is 55.45 km2, spanning 14&nbs ...

in 2006,

Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima is a city in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 118,159 in 50,365 households, and a population density of 310 persons per km2. The total area of the city was . Geography Aizuwakamatsu is located in the wes ...

in 2008 (and to LibreOffice as of 2012), Shikokuchūō, Ehime in 2009,

Minoh, Osaka is a city in northwestern Osaka Prefecture, Japan. Its name is commonly romanized as "Minō" or "Minoo"; however, the city government officially uses the spelling Minoh in English. As of October 2016, the city has an estimated population of 13 ...

in 2009

Toyokawa, Aichi is a city in the eastern part of Aichi Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 183,930 in 72,949 households, and a population density of 1,141 persons per km2. The total area of the city is . Toyokawa, famous for its Toyok ...

, Fukagawa, Hokkaido and Katano, Osaka in 2010 and Ryūgasaki, Ibaraki in 2011. Corporate conversions included Assist in 2007 (and to LibreOffice on

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', '' Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All th ...

in 2011), Sumitomo Electric Industries in 2008 (and to LibreOffice in 2012), Toho Co., Ltd. in 2009 and Shinsei Financial Co., Ltd. in 2010. Assist also provided support services for OpenOffice.org.

Retail

In July 2007, Everex, a division of

First International Computer First International Computer, Inc. (FIC; ) is a Taiwanese original equipment manufacturer and system integrator for automotive electronics and smart building controls. FIC provides design consultancy and supply chain management services for auto ...

and the 9th-largest PC supplier in the U.S., began shipping systems preloaded with OpenOffice.org 2.2 into

Wal-Mart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores from the United States, headquarte ...

, K-mart and

Sam's Club Sam's West, Inc. (doing business as Sam's Club) is an American chain of membership-only retail warehouse clubs owned and operated by Walmart Inc., founded in 1983 and named after Walmart founder Sam Walton as Sam’s Wholesale Club. , Sam's C ...

outlets in North America.

Forks and derivative software

A number of open source and proprietary products derive at least some code from OpenOffice.org, including AndrOpen Office,

, ChinaOffice, Co-Create Office, EuroOffice 2005,

Go-oo Go-oo (also Go-Open Office; previously called ooo-build) is a discontinued free office suite which started as a set of patches for OpenOffice.org, then later became an independent fork of OpenOffice.org with a number of enhancements, sponsored b ...

, KaiOffice,

IBM Lotus Symphony IBM Lotus Symphony is a discontinued suite of applications for creating, editing, and sharing text, spreadsheet, presentations, and other documents and browsing the World Wide Web. It was first distributed as commercial proprietary software, ...

, IBM Workplace, Jambo OpenOffice (the first office suite in

Swahili Swahili may refer to: * Swahili language, a Bantu language official in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda and widely spoken in the African Great Lakes * Swahili people, an ethnic group in East Africa * Swahili culture Swahili culture is the culture of ...

, MagyarOffice, MultiMedia Office, MYOffice 2007, NeoOffice, NextOffice, OfficeOne, OfficeTLE, OOo4Kids, OpenOfficePL, OpenOffice.org Portable, OpenOfficeT7, OpenOffice.ux.pl, OxOffice, OxygenOffice Professional, Pladao Office, PlusOffice Mac, RedOffice, RomanianOffice,

/Oracle Open Office, SunShine Office, ThizOffice, UP Office, White Label Office, WPS Office Storm (the 2004 edition of Kingsoft Office) and 602Office. The OpenOffice.org website also listed a large variety of complementary products, including groupware systems. Major derivatives include:

Active

Apache OpenOffice

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. IBM employees did the majority of the development, including hiring ex-Star Division developers. The Apache project removed or replaced as much code as possible from OpenOffice.org 3.4 beta 1, including fonts, under licenses unacceptable to Apache and released 3.4.0 in May 2012. The codebase for IBM's Lotus Symphony was donated to the Apache Software Foundation in 2012 and merged for Apache OpenOffice 4.0, and Symphony was deprecated in favour of Apache OpenOffice. While the project considers itself the unbroken continuation of OpenOffice.org, others regard it as a fork, or at the least a separate project. In October 2014, Bruce Byfield, writing for

Linux Magazine ''Linux Magazine'' is an international magazine for Linux software enthusiasts and professionals. It is published by the former Linux New Media division of the German media company Medialinx AG. The magazine was first published in German in 19 ...

, said the project had "all but stalled ossiblydue to IBM's withdrawal from the project." , the project has no release manager, and itself reports a lack of volunteer involvement and code contributions. After ongoing problems with unfixed

security" \n\n\nsecurity.txt is a proposed standard for websites' security information that is meant to allow security researchers to easily report security vulnerabilities. The standard prescribes a text file called \"security.txt\" in the well known locat ...

vulnerabilities from 2015 onward, in September 2016 the project started discussions on possibly retiring AOO.

Collabora Online

Collabora Online has LibreOffice at its core and can be integrated into any web application. It enables collaborative real-time editing with applications for word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawing and vector graphics. It is developed by Collabora Productivity, a division of Collabora who are a commercial partner with LibreOffice's parent organisation The Document Foundation (TDF), the majority of the LibreOffice software development is done by its commercial partners, Collabora, Red Hat, CIB, and Allotropia.

LibreOffice

Sun had stated in the original OpenOffice.org announcement in 2000 that the project would be run by a neutral foundation, and put forward a more detailed proposal in 2001. There were many calls to put this into effect over the ensuing years. On 28 September 2010, in frustration at years of perceived neglect of the codebase and community by Sun and then Oracle, members of the OpenOffice.org community announced a non-profit called The Document Foundation and a fork of OpenOffice.org named LibreOffice. Go-oo improvements were merged, and that project was retired in favour of LibreOffice. The goal was to produce a vendor-independent office suite with ODF support and without any copyright assignment requirements. Oracle was invited to become a member of the Document Foundation and was asked to donate the OpenOffice.org brand. Oracle instead demanded that all members of the OpenOffice.org Community Council involved with the Document Foundation step down, leaving the Council composed only of Oracle employees. Most Linux distributions promptly replaced OpenOffice.org with LibreOffice;

Oracle Linux Oracle Linux (abbreviated OL, formerly known as Oracle Enterprise Linux or OEL) is a Linux distribution packaged and freely distributed by Oracle, available partially under the GNU General Public License since late 2006. It is compiled from Red ...

6 also features LibreOffice rather than OpenOffice.org or Apache OpenOffice. The project rapidly accumulated developers, development effort and added features, the majority of outside OpenOffice.org developers having moved to LibreOffice. In March 2015, an LWN.net development comparison of LibreOffice with Apache OpenOffice concluded that "LibreOffice has won the battle for developer participation".

NeoOffice

NeoOffice, an independent commercial port for

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...

that tracked the main line of development, offered a native OS X Aqua user interface before OpenOffice.org did. Later versions are derived from Go-oo, rather than directly from OpenOffice.org. All versions from NeoOffice 3.1.1 to NeoOffice 2015 were based on OpenOffice.org 3.1.1, though latter versions included stability fixes from LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice. NeoOffice 2017 and later versions are fully based on LibreOffice.

Discontinued

Go-oo

The ooo-build

patch Patch or Patches may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media * Patch Johnson, a fictional character from ''Days of Our Lives'' * Patch (''My Little Pony''), a toy * "Patches" (Dickey Lee song), 1962 * "Patches" (Chairmen of the Board song ...

set was started at

Ximian Ximian, Inc. (previously called Helix Code and originally named International Gnome Support) was an American company that developed, sold and supported application software for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform. It was founded by Migue ...

in 2002, because Sun were slow to accept outside work on OpenOffice.org, even from corporate partners, and to make the build process easier on Linux. It tracked the main line of development and was not intended to constitute a fork. Most Linux distributions used, and worked together on, ooo-build. Sun's contributions to OpenOffice.org had been declining for a number of years and some developers were unwilling to assign copyright in their work to Sun, particularly given the deal between Sun and IBM to license the code outside the LGPL. On 2 October 2007,

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi- platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the l ...

announced that ooo-build would be available as a software package called Go-oo, not merely a patch set. (The go-oo.org

domain name A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. ...

had been in use by ooo-build as early as 2005.) Sun reacted negatively, with Simon Phipps of Sun terming it "a hostile and competitive fork". Many

advocates worried that Go-oo was a Novell effort to incorporate

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

technologies, such as Office Open XML, that might be vulnerable to

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling disclo ...

claims. However, the office suite branded "OpenOffice.org" in most Linux distributions, having previously been ooo-build, soon in fact became Go-oo. Go-oo also encouraged outside contributions, with rules similar to those later adopted for LibreOffice. When LibreOffice forked, Go-oo was deprecated in favour of that project. OpenOffice Novell edition was a supported version of Go-oo.

IBM Lotus Symphony

The Workplace Managed Client in IBM Workplace 2.6 (23 January 2006) incorporated code from OpenOffice.org 1.1.4, the last version under the SISSL. This code was broken out into a separate application as Lotus Symphony (30 May 2008), with a new interface based on

Eclipse An eclipse is an astronomical event that occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three ce ...

. Symphony 3.0 (21 October 2010) was rebased on OpenOffice.org 3.0, with the code licensed privately from Sun. IBM's changes were donated to the Apache Software Foundation in 2012, Symphony was deprecated in favour of Apache OpenOffice and its code was merged into Apache OpenOffice 4.0.

StarOffice

Sun used OpenOffice.org as a base for its commercial proprietary StarOffice application software, which was OpenOffice.org with some added proprietary components. Oracle bought Sun in January 2010 and quickly renamed StarOffice to Oracle Open Office. Oracle discontinued development in April 2011.

References

External links

* {{Authority control 2002 software Cross-platform free software Formerly proprietary software Free PDF software Free software programmed in C++ Free software programmed in Java (programming language) Office suites for macOS Office suites for Windows Open-source office suites Discontinued software Portable software Unix software Office suites