Star Division (also written as Star-Division) was a German software company best known for developing the now discontinued

StarOffice StarOffice is a discontinued proprietary software, proprietary office suite. Its source code continues today in derived open-source office suites Collabora Online and LibreOffice. StarOffice supported the OpenOffice.org XML file format, as well ...

suite. It was founded in 1985 by 16-year-old

Marco Börries Marco Börries (born 1 August 1968) is a German IT entrepreneur. He is best known as the founder of Star Division, who developed StarOffice, which later became OpenOffice.org. Börries founded Star Division at 16, launching the word processor ...

Lüneburg Lüneburg, officially the Hanseatic City of Lüneburg and also known in English as Lunenburg, is a town in the German Bundesland (Germany), state of Lower Saxony. It is located about southeast of another Hanseatic League, Hanseatic city, Hambur ...

as a garage company. After a neighbour denounced the operation of a business in a residential area to the Ordnungsamt, the company moved to

Hamburg Hamburg (, ; ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg,. is the List of cities in Germany by population, second-largest city in Germany after Berlin and List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, 7th-lar ...

. As its first product the company distributed StarWriter, 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. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current word ...

application developed by friends. Positioned as a cheaper alternative to

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at CO ...

, StarWriter later became

, for which the company became famous. The software had sales of over 25 million worldwide, and at its peak it had a market share among other office suites of about 25% in Germany. Caldera, Inc. supported the Linux port of StarOffice 3.1 with ca. 800.000 DM in order to offer the product with their forthcoming OpenLinux distribution in 1997. In 1998 Börries released StarOffice free of charge for private use. Star Division was acquired by the software and hardware vendor

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

on 5 August 1999 for a higher double-digit million amount in US dollars. Sun reintroduced the software as StarOffice 5.1a, and for the first time also free of charge for commercial use. The StarOffice suite has since been further improved by Sun Microsystems and the

OpenOffice OpenOffice or open office may refer to: Computing Software * OpenOffice.org (OOo), a discontinued open-source office software suite, originally based on StarOffice * Apache OpenOffice (AOO), a derivative of OOo by the Apache Software Foundation, ...

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 ...

communities. Sun Microsystems became a wholly owned subsidiary of

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Co-founded in 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, who remains executive chairman, Oracle was ...

on 27 January 2010.

Notes

References

External links

* Star Division, Inc. (archived web site fro
1996-12-19
t
1998-04-22
* Star Division GmbH (archived web site fro
1996-12-19
t
1998-02-13
{{DEFAULTSORT:Star Division 1985 establishments in West Germany Companies established in 1985 Defunct software companies of Germany Software companies disestablished in 1999 Software companies of Germany