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. In June 2011, Oracle gave it to the Apache Foundation, even though giving it to The Document Foundation was considered. Oracle decided it no longer wanted to develop the suite.

Sun was acquired by Oracle in January 2010. A release has around nine months until it is no longer developed. The organization’s goal is to release a new version every six months.

Since starting with version OpenOffice 3.3.0, The Document Foundation has released several updates and versions of the office suite. It was based on OpenOffice 3.3 and patches and build software from Novell Go-oo. LibreOffice was first released in January 2011, several months after The Document Foundation was announced. It was first announced in September 2010 and incorporated in February 2012. Those who had been key developers left Oracle to form The Document Foundation. In September 2010, several members, who who were part of the committee that developed, 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.

Sun Microsystems controlled the project until 2010, when it was bought out by Oracle. The corporation that developed Java, made the application open source in 2000. StarOffice was released in 1985.Sun Microsystems acquired the company in 1999.

OpenOffice was developed from StarOffice – created by StarDivision, a German corporation.

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