In the late 90s, Star Division was acquired by . Sun was a hardware giant known for SPARC servers and the Java programming language, but they were struggling to combat the "Wintel" monopoly (Windows + Intel). Microsoft Office was eating the world, and Sun needed a weapon to break the lock-in.
It was a messy divorce. Oracle refused to give the new foundation the "OpenOffice.org" trademark. The developers didn't care; they took the code and started fixing the years of backlog that Sun had ignored. openoffice linux
For a brief, chaotic period, Linux distributions had to choose sides. Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian made the pragmatic choice: they switched their default installs from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. In the late 90s, Star Division was acquired by
Here is the detailed story of OpenOffice on Linux. It was a messy divorce