Histrory of LibreOffice
OpenOffice was developed from StarOffice – created by StarDivision, a German corporation. StarOffice was released in 1985.Sun Microsystems acquired the company in 1999. The corporation that developed Java, made the application open source in 2000. OpenOffice.org 1.0 was released in May 2002.
Sun Microsystems controlled the project until 2010, when it was bought out by Oracle. In September 2010, several members, who who were part of the committee that developed OpenOffice.org, announced a fork (using source code from one application to make a new, similar one) of OpenOffice because they thought the Oracle, would not allow the office suite development to be as open as they thought it should and thought that a non-profit organization would serve the project better.
Those who had been key OpenOffice.org developers left Oracle to form The Document Foundation. It was first announced in September 2010 and incorporated in February 2012. LibreOffice was first released in January 2011, several months after The Document Foundation was announced. It was based on OpenOffice 3.3 and patches and build software from Novell Go-oo.
Since starting with version OpenOffice 3.3.0, The Document Foundation has released several updates and versions of the office suite. The organization’s goal is to release a new version every six months. A release has around nine months until it is no longer developed.
Sun was acquired by Oracle in January 2010. Oracle decided it no longer wanted to develop the suite. In June 2011, Oracle gave it to the Apache Foundation, even though giving it to The Document Foundation was considered.
The move to donate suite, now called Apache OpenOffice, was supported by IBM, who had been a contributor to OpenOffice’s development since its Sun Microsystems days and used the source code for one of its products, Lotus Symphony. IBM discontinued Symphony and donated its code to Apache shortly after Oracle gave the foundation OpenOffice.