It started with a dual license-LGPL and the proprietary SISSL (Sun Industry Standard Software License)-but it evolved to pure LGPL from version 2.0." The Document Foundation told me, "For almost 10 years, the software was developed under Sun stewardship, from version 1.0 to version 3.2. Anyone could download the office suite at no charge for personal use.
In 1999, Sun Microsystems bought Star Division for $73.5 million, changed the software's name to, and released the code as open source. The Document Foundation's team told me that "StarWriter, the ancestor of the LibreOffice suite, was developed as proprietary software by Marco Börries, a German student, to write his high school final thesis." He formed a company called Star Division to develop the software. My reminiscing led me to reach out to the Document Foundation, which governs LibreOffice, to learn more about the history of this open source productivity software. And, over time, it became an important part of my career as a student and an educator. StarWriter wasn't quite the equivalent of Word, but it (and StarOffice's other components) were all adequate and free. Word seemed like a dream come true-it highlighted misspelled words and underlined grammatically incorrect phrases. My go-to word processor had been Microsoft Word.
Before that, I had used a variety of word processors on a variety of operating systems.
It wasn't called LibreOffice back then-it was called StarOffice 3.1, and it was part of my first really successful Linux install on Red Hat 6.1.
Discover more about its background and what our community has achieved in recent years:
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