StarOffice

StarOffice is a proprietary office suite that originated with StarDivision. It included a set of integrated applications such as StarWriter (word processor), StarCalc (spreadsheet), StarDraw (vector graphics), StarImpress (presentation), StarBase (database), and StarChart (charting). The software was designed to run on multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Unix-like systems, and was marketed as an all-in-one productivity suite.

In 1999, Sun Microsystems acquired StarOffice from StarDivision. Under Sun, StarOffice was offered as a commercial product with regular updates and support, and it was distributed for desktop environments across several operating systems.

StarOffice played a key role in the development of OpenOffice.org. In 2000, Sun released much of StarOffice’s code as open-source, forming the basis of the OpenOffice.org project. OpenOffice.org released its first major versions in the following years and became a widely used open-source office suite. After Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, development of the open-source project continued under different governance structures. The software community later saw forks and reorganizations, most notably LibreOffice, started by The Document Foundation around 2010–2011, and Apache OpenOffice, which emerged after OpenOffice.org’s code was donated to the Apache Software Foundation in 2011.

Today, StarOffice as a standalone commercial product is no longer actively developed; its legacy lives on in the open-source successors OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. The StarOffice brand itself has largely been superseded by these open-source projects, which continue to provide similar office-suite functionality.