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. Active successor projects include
LibreOffice (the most actively developed),
Apache OpenOffice,
(enterprise ready LibreOffice) and
NeoOffice (commercial, and available only for macOS).
OpenOffice was an open-sourced version of the earlier
StarOffice, 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, the ...
acquired in 1999 for internal use. Sun open-sourced the OpenOffice suite in July 2000 as a competitor to
Microsoft Office,
releasing version 1.0 on 1 May 2002.
OpenOffice included a
word processor (Writer), a
spreadsheet (Calc), a
presentation application (Impress), a
drawing
Drawing is a form of visual art in which an artist uses instruments to mark paper or other two-dimensional surface. Drawing instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, various kinds of paints, inked brushes, colored pencils, crayons, ...
application (Draw), a
formula editor (Math), and a
database management application (Base).
Its default
file format
A file format is a 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 or free.
Some file formats ...
was the
OpenDocument Format (ODF), an
ISO/
IEC
The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC; in French: ''Commission électrotechnique internationale'') is an international standards organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronic and r ...
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,
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
and
Solaris
Solaris may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Literature, television and film
* ''Solaris'' (novel), a 1961 science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem
** ''Solaris'' (1968 film), directed by Boris Nirenburg
** ''Solaris'' (1972 film), directed by ...
, 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 lapt ...
, with
ports to other
operating systems. It was distributed under the
GNU Lesser General Public License 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 ...
. Apache renamed the software
Apache OpenOffice.
History
OpenOffice.org originated as
StarOffice, a