[http://www.openoffice.org/ OpenOffice.org] was initially created by a company called StarDivision in Germany under the name “StarOffice”. The source code of this application was later acquired by Sun Microsystems in August of 1999. To reduce the overwhelming share of market for Microsoft Office, the code of StarOffice was released to public in July of 2000. By doing this Sun Microsystems offered a free and open alternative to Microsoft office.

Based on its mission statement, goal of [http://www.openoffice.org/ OpenOffice.org] is "''To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.''"