Sun StarOffice

» see staroffice.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

staroffice started in 1985 in hamburg as starwriter, written by a 16-year-old marco börries for a single german professor. it grew into a full office suite under börries's company star division and shipped on basically every desktop platform that existed at the time (dos, os/2, windows, mac, linux, solaris). it had its own document format and its own database. by the late 90s it was the best-known cross-platform commercial office suite that was not microsoft office.

in august 1999 sun microsystems bought star division for $59.5 million. the public reason was strategic. the actual reason, according to scott mcnealy at the time, was that licensing microsoft office for sun's 42,000 employees would have cost more than buying the company outright. sun shipped staroffice as a free download for a while, then in july 2000 open-sourced the codebase as openoffice.org. that move turned a moderately popular suite into the standard free alternative to microsoft office for the next decade.

oracle bought sun in january 2010. by september of that year a large group of openoffice contributors, anxious about oracle's intentions, forked the project as libreoffice under a new foundation. the fork took most of the active developers with it. oracle held on to the trademark and the commercial product for another six months. in april 2011 oracle quietly discontinued commercial development of what was by then called oracle open office. in june they donated the codebase to the apache foundation. the brand staroffice was over.

i was a computer-engineering student in turkey through most of the openoffice years. i ran openoffice on my linux laptop because microsoft office was something you used on the windows machine in the lab and openoffice was something you used at home. i did not know at the time that the suite i was using had a 26-year hamburg backstory. i was just opening writer because it was free and it would read the.doc the professor sent.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the actual end ~

the libreoffice fork in september 2010 was the death blow. the document foundation announced the new project and the major linux distributions started switching their default office suite within months. oracle's window for being a credible steward of openoffice closed before they had even decided what they wanted to do with it. when oracle gave up commercial development of staroffice in april 2011 and donated the codebase to apache in june, the brand was already obsolete. apache openoffice still exists as a project, but it has been outpaced by libreoffice on every meaningful metric for over a decade.

~ what remains ~

libreoffice is the direct descendant. every linux distribution ships it. every government agency that had openoffice as a microsoft-office alternative is now on libreoffice. the open document format (odf) that came out of openoffice's development is an iso standard. so staroffice the brand died, but the engineering survived through the fork and is still the default free office suite in 2026.

~ the funny part ~

the most quoted line about the original sun acquisition is mcnealy's joke that buying star division was cheaper than licensing microsoft office for sun employees. the math actually checked out. microsoft office at corporate volume was around $200 per seat. sun had 42,000 seats. that is roughly $8 million per year in licensing, every year. star division cost $59.5 million once. the joke was a joke and also a balance sheet decision.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »