StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. Subsequent versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, were built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation. Sun continued to sponsor development on OpenOffice.org for the next 10 years, a period during which not only did the project grow tremendously and became truly global, but the user base also saw an extraordinary increase, and as of the end of 2010 was estimated to be in excess of 100 Million. With its acquisition of Sun in 2010, Oracle was the principal contributor of code to OpenOffice.org. On June 1, 2011, OpenOffice.org, the project and product, including source code, trademarks, domain names and website, were donated to the Apache Software Foundation.

The source is written in C++ and delivers language-neutral and scriptable functionality, including Java™ APIs. This source technology introduces the next-stage architecture, allowing use of the suite elements as separate applications or as embedded components in other applications. Numerous other features are also present including XML-based file formats based on the vendor-neutral OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard from OASIS and other resources.

Apache Openoffice is released under the Apache License Version 2.0. Previous versions, under the OpenOffice.org name, were released under the the LGPL 3.0 license.

This web site, www.openoffice.org, is Apache OpenOffice's primary user portal. The primary developer portal for Apache OpenOffice is Apache OpenOffice

There are a variety of ways you can actively participate in the OpenOffice Community. These range from something as easy as donating to the Apache Software Foundation, or participating in mailing lists, to actually contributing code for the product. Please visit the Apache Software Foundation Get Involved page for an overview on what it means to be an Apache contributor/committer.

To contribute to (volunteer with) the Openoffice project (user or developer web sites or product), please subscribe to the Apache Openoffice developer mailing list to get started. Please visit Apache OpenOffice Get Involved for specific information about getting involved in the Apache OpenOffice project.

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Mailing Lists

Much of the excitement of an Open Source site takes place in the mailing lists. These are public.

All our major lists are public. What you post to these is on the public Internet. We suggest you do not post private information and keep in mind the public and persistent nature of all that you write to the lists.

For questions having to do with the Apache OpenOffice product, please use our "users" list: users-subscribe@openoffice.apache.org.

Besides that list, we have two general lists: our "announce" list, which is for major announcements and has little traffic, and the "dev" list, which is for general discussions related to the project and is fairly heavily trafficked.

To subscribe to any of these lists, click on the appropriate link below and send the email message. Leave the subject line and body empty.

• announce-subscribe@openoffice.apache.org
• users-subscribe@openoffice.apache.org
• dev-subscribe@openoffice.apache.org

We are constantly collecting testimonials from people and businesses actually using the product. You may read them on our Testimonials page. Send yours to: marketing@openoffice.apache.org.

OpenOffice wins awards. Our Awards Page lists some of the more recent ones.

We very much welcome your participation and your comments on all facets of Apache OpenOffice.

Please contact us using the developer mailing list.

If, on the other hand, you have questions regarding how to use OpenOffice, the software, please address your questions to our "users" list. Subscribe using users-subscribe@openoffice.apache.org.