Technology moves fast. Context matters. Independent by design ↗
vnunet.
Explore topics

Find your next rabbit hole.

Explore the collection, or type to search.

ExplainerPHP2Shell: the two PHP flaws that put most of the web at riskIn October 2026 two critical memory-safety bugs in PHP itself, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, leaked before the fix was ready. They let an attacker with no account run code on servers running PHP versions going back to 5.4.ExplainerFrom morphing to Sora: a short history of AI videoIn 1991 a few seconds of faces melting into each other in a Michael Jackson video took a specialist studio weeks. Thirty-odd years later a sentence typed into a browser produces a moving clip. This is how computers learned to make video, from hand-placed morph lines to GANs, deepfakes and text-to-video models such as Sora.ExplainerThe eMudhra key compromise: when a certificate authority’s keys could be guessedIn October 2026 a researcher showed that eight intermediate certificate authority keys belonging to India’s eMudhra were so weak they could be recovered in under a second. Browsers blocked them within hours, and eMudhra quit the global TLS certificate business.ExplainerAI and security: faster bug hunting, faster attacks and new targetsAI models now find serious flaws in core internet software, and attackers use the same tools to exploit them within hours. What October 2026’s run of disclosures shows about the risks, and what defenders can do.ExplainerYahoo closes GeoCities: how the web lost millions of home pagesYahoo bought GeoCities for billions in 1999 and switched it off a decade later. The closure became a turning point for web preservation.

Press Esc to close

2000–2011 · Open source

OpenOffice.org: the free office suite that challenged Microsoft Office

Last reviewed 5 October 2026

Sun Microsystems bought StarOffice, released its code as OpenOffice.org and gave the world a free alternative to Microsoft Office, then lost it to a fork after Oracle took over.

From StarOffice to open source

StarOffice began in the 1980s at Star Division, a German company founded by Marco Börries. It grew into a full suite with a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing programs, and it was popular in Germany and on Linux and Solaris, where Microsoft Office was not available.

Sun Microsystems bought Star Division in 1999. It gave StarOffice away free and, in 2000, released most of its source code as a new open-source project called OpenOffice.org. Sun kept selling StarOffice as a supported commercial version built from the same code.

Growing up

OpenOffice.org 1.0 arrived in 2002. It ran on Windows, Linux and other systems, could open and save Microsoft Office files, and cost nothing. Linux distributions shipped it by default, and it became the standard example of desktop open source alongside Firefox.

Early versions were criticised as slow to start and imperfect with complex Word documents, and reviews often said the project was lagging behind Microsoft. Version 2.0 in 2005 brought a database program and made the OpenDocument Format its default. OpenDocument was approved as an international standard, ISO/IEC 26300, in 2006.

Governments and the format wars

OpenOffice.org mattered beyond its own users because it made open document formats practical. Public bodies in Europe and elsewhere, including the city of Munich and the French Gendarmerie, adopted it, and several governments set policies favouring open formats. Microsoft responded by taking its own Office Open XML format through standardisation, and the 2007–2008 ISO vote on it was one of the most bitterly fought in the standards body’s history.

Oracle, LibreOffice and Apache

Oracle acquired Sun in 2010. Many long-time contributors, worried about Oracle’s plans, formed The Document Foundation that September and forked the code as LibreOffice. Most Linux distributions switched to it within a year.

In 2011 Oracle gave the OpenOffice.org trademark and code to the Apache Software Foundation, where it continues as Apache OpenOffice. LibreOffice became the more actively developed of the two. Both still descend from the StarOffice code Sun opened up in 2000.

Sources

  • Wikipedia: OpenOffice.org
  • Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice.org source code release announcement, 2000
  • The Document Foundation, announcement of LibreOffice, September 2010

More on Open source