StarOffice

StarOffice, known briefly as Oracle Open Office before being discontinued in 2011, was a proprietary office suite. It originated in 1985 as StarWriter by StarDivision, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999. Sun was itself acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010.

StarOffice supports the OpenOffice.org XML file format, as well as the OpenDocument standard, and can generate PDF and Flash formats. It includes templates, a macro recorder, and a software development kit (SDK).

The source code of the suite was released in July 2000, creating a free, open source office suite called OpenOffice.org, which subsequent versions of StarOffice were based on, with additional proprietary components.

In March 2009, a study showed that StarOffice only had a 3% market share in the corporate market.

In April 2011, Oracle announced the discontinuation of Oracle Open Office as part of the decision to turn OpenOffice.org into a "purely community-based project".

History

StarWriter 1.0 was written by Marco Börries in 1985 for the Zilog Z80. Börries formed StarDivision in Lüneburg the following year. It was later ported to the Amstrad CPC (marketed by Schneider in Germany) under CP/M, and later the Commodore 64 under Microsoft BASIC, which was later ported to the 8086-based Amstrad PC-1512, running under MS-DOS 3.2. Later, the integration of the other individual programs followed as the development progressed to an Office Suite for DOS, IBM's OS/2 Warp, and for the Microsoft Windows operating-system. From this time onwards StarDivision marketed its suite under the name "StarOffice."