StarOffice is a discontinued

proprietary {{Short pages monitor 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 Caldera OpenLinux is a defunct Linux distribution produced by Caldera, Inc. (and its successors Caldera Systems and Caldera International) that existed from 1997 to 2002. Based on the German LST Power Linux distribution, OpenLinux was an early ...

distribution in 1997.

StarOffice 4.0

Supported platforms included Windows 3.1/95, OS/2, Linux i386, Solaris Sparc/x86,

Mac OS Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. in a succession of two major series. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the classic Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system ...

(beta).

StarOffice 5

5.0 was released late November 1998. Supported platforms included Windows 95/ NT 3.51, OS/2, Linux i386, Solaris Sparc/x86.

5.1

5.1 was released 20 May 1999. Supported platforms included Windows 95, OS/2, Linux i386, Solaris Sparc/x86.

5.2

5.2 was released 20 June 2000. Sun offered StarOffice 5.2 as a free download for personal use, and soon went through an exercise similar to

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was o ...

's relicensing of

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

, by releasing most of the StarOffice source code under a

free Free may refer to: Concept * Freedom, the ability to act or change without constraint or restriction * Emancipate, attaining civil and political rights or equality * Free (''gratis''), free of charge * Gratis versus libre, the difference betw ...

open source license Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative ...

. 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. Sun then took "snapshots" of the OpenOffice.org code base, integrated proprietary and third-party code modules, and marketed the package commercially. StarOffice 5.2 was the last version to contain the programs listed under older discontinued components. It was also the last version to support multiple virtual desktops, previously available from within the Suite. Supported platforms included: MS Windows 95/98/NT/

2000 2000 was designated as the International Year for the Culture of Peace and the World Mathematics, Mathematical Year. Popular culture holds the year 2000 as the first year of the 21st century and the 3rd millennium, because of a tende ...

, Linux i386, Solaris Sparc/x86.

StarOffice 6

A beta version of 6.0 (based on OpenOffice.org 638c) was released in October 2001; the final 6.0 (based on OpenOffice.org 1.0) was released in May 2002. Support for OpenOffice.org XML file format. Supported platforms included Windows 95, Linux i386, Solaris Sparc/x86. OpenOffice.org version also supported Windows ME/2000 for Asian/CJK versions, generic Linux 2.2.13 with 2.1.3, Solaris 7 SPARC (8 for Asian version).

StarOffice 7

Based on OpenOffice.org 1.1. Released 14 November 2003. Supported platforms included

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. It was the second operating system in the 9x line, as the successor to Windows 95. It was Software ...

, Linux i386,

Solaris 8 Oracle Solaris is a proprietary Unix operating system offered by Oracle for SPARC and x86-64 based workstations and servers. Originally developed by Sun Microsystems as Solaris, it superseded the company's earlier SunOS in 1993 and became know ...

Sparc/x86. OpenOffice.org version also supports generic Linux with

Glibc The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project implementation of the C standard library. It provides a wrapper around the system calls of the Linux kernel and other kernels for application use. Despite its name, it now also dir ...

2.2.0, Mac OS X 10.2 for

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

with

X11 The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

in OOO 1.1.2. Product Update 5 added Windows NT 4.0 as a supported platform and incorporated support for the OpenDocument file-format. Product Updates 6-8 are based on OpenOffice.org 2.1. The OOO version added support for

Mac OS X 10.3 Mac OS X Panther (version 10.3) is the fourth major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system. It followed Mac OS X Jaguar and preceded Mac OS X Tiger. It was released on October 24, 2003, with the retail price of US$129 ...

for PowerPC, and for

Mac OS X 10.4 Mac OS X Tiger (version 10.4) is the 5th major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Mac computers. Tiger was released to the public on April 29, 2005, for US$129.95 as the successor to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Incl ...

for x86. Product Updates 9-11 built on OpenOffice.org 2.2. New features included enhanced

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

integration, PDF export. Product Update 12 was based on OpenOffice.org 2.4. The OOO version added support for Linux x86-64, Linux MIPS, Linux S390,

Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

x86/PowerPC above 10.4. New features included improved input and sorting in Calc, block markings in text documents, new import filtering, improved security, access to

WebDAV WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for conc ...

servers via

HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It uses encryption for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protoc ...

, and PDF export for long-term archiving.

StarOffice 8

Sun released StarOffice 8 (based on the code of OpenOffice.org 2.0) on 27 September 2005, adding support for the OpenDocument standard and a number of improvements. Supported platforms include Windows 98/

(Service Pack 2 or higher), Linux i386, Solaris 8 Sparc/x86. Product Updates 2–5 are based on OpenOffice.org 2.1. Product Updates 6–7 are based on OpenOffice.org 2.2. New features include enhanced

integration, PDF export. Product Updates 8–9 are based on OpenOffice.org 2.3. New features include bookmark support for PDF export,

MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...

export in Writer. Product Updates 10–11 are based on OpenOffice.org 2.4. New features include improved input and sorting in Calc, block markings in text documents, new import filter, improved security, access to

servers via

, PDF export for long-term archiving.

StarOffice 9

StarOffice 9, released 17 November 2008, added support for version 1.2 of the OpenDocument standard and Microsoft Office 2007 files and a number of other improvements. It is based on OpenOffice.org 3.0. Supported platforms include Windows 2000 (Service Pack 2 or higher),

(Intel version), Linux 2.4 i386 with version 2.3.2 or higher,

GTK GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free software cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both Free software, free and ...

version 2.2.0 or higher, Solaris 10 for Sparc/x86. OOO version supports Mac OS X PowerPC, generic Linux platforms. Product Update 1 is based on OpenOffice.org 3.0.1, which adds improved extension manager, but requires extensions in the new format Product Update 2 is based on OpenOffice.org 3.1.0. Product Update 3 is based on OpenOffice.org 3.1.1. Product Update 4 is based on OpenOffice.org 3.2.

Oracle Open Office

Oracle bought Sun in January 2010 and quickly renamed StarOffice as Oracle Open Office. On 15 December 2010, Oracle released Oracle Open Office 3.3, based on OpenOffice.org 3.3 beta, and a web-based version called ''Oracle Cloud Office''. The suite was released in two versions, sold at and .

Pricing and licensing

Traditionally, StarOffice

licenses A license (American English) or licence (Commonwealth English) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another part ...

sold for around , but in 2004, Sun planned to offer subscription-based licenses to Japanese customers for about () per year (Becker, 2004). P. Ulander, a desktop products manager for Sun, acknowledged that Sun planned to expand subscription-based licenses to other countries as well. In January 2009, Sun's website offered StarOffice for . Sun used a per-person license for StarOffice, compared to the per-device licenses used for most other

proprietary software Proprietary software is computer software, software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing t ...

. An individual purchaser gains the right to install the software on up to five computers. For example, a small-business owner can have the software on laptop, office and home computers, or a user with a computer running

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

, and another running

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

, can install StarOffice on both computers. In 2010, StarOffice 9 Software was no longer offered free of charge to education customers, but StarOffice 8 could still be used without charge. The free OpenOffice.org 3.0, with the same functionality as StarOffice 9, could also be used. 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. From August 2007 to November 2008,

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

offered StarOffice 8 as part of its free downloadable

Google Pack Google Pack was a collection of software tools offered by Google to download in a single archive. It was announced at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show, on January 6. Google Pack was only available for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. I ...

application.

Derivatives

OpenOffice.org was open source, and gave rise to many derivative versions and successor projects to StarOffice. ,

Collabora Online Collabora Online is an open source online office suite based on LibreOffice, enabling web-based collaborative real-time editing of word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and vector graphics. Optional apps are available for deskto ...

and

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite developed by The Document Foundation (TDF). It was created in 2010 as a fork of OpenOffice.org, itself a successor to StarOffice. The suite includes applications ...

are still actively developed.

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

is mostly dormant and has not seen a new major release for over 10 years.

NeoOffice NeoOffice is a discontinued office suite for the macOS operating system developed by Planamesa Inc. It was a commercial fork of the free and open source LibreOffice office suite, including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, and ...

was also a derivative, but announced that it was no longer active in early 2024.

References

External links

* {{Office suites 1985 software Office suites Office suites for Linux Office suites for Windows OpenOffice Oracle software Proprietary software Solaris software Sun Microsystems software