Open Office History

Open Office is a piece of software that most people will have heard of. It’s an office suite which let you manage all of the documents you could ever need to use in a business environment. One thing you don’t have is a page which will give you all the information you could need about the history of Open Office. No matter what you want to know about the past and the future, you should be able to find out and if that isn’t the case, please contact us and we’ll do our best to help you out.

Open Office History

The history of any software is important, it’ll help you to see how such a revolutionary suite developed over the years and how it all begun. Everything began with OpenOffice 1, released in 2001. This was actually the first of its kind, Microsoft Office had been known as the main and only suite you could use in your business and that meant you really didn’t have a lot of choice in what you had to use. StarDivision wanted to change this and that’s exactly what they did – a group of programs completely free of charge. It was still rather basic but updates came often and a lot of great functionality was added, something that many people loved about Open Office.

Even though Open Office had been created as a free alternative, a lot of people were still using MS Office. Sun Microsystems took over the development in 2002 and felt that better compatibility with this suite was essential to make it fully viable in the future. OpenOffice 2 gave exactly this, more file formats were added to make sure that you could use it on a regular basis and still be able to share the documents with other users. The software was also completely re-coded to make sure it was even quicker to use, which made it one of the most desirable open source office suites of it’s time. This is when it started to gain a lot more popularity.

There were gradually more and more updates throughout the years until 2008 which is when the next major release of Open Office was announced to the public, again by Sun Microsystems. This added a lot more technical features which were of great help to businesses and those with advanced and complex requirements. Greater support for XML files was implemented to allow data to be saved in a much easier format, the new Open Document Format was also created. This is the last main version which has been written at the time of writing this but we expect that in the future, there will be a lot more updates that you should keep up-to-date with. Oracle are currently the main developers and they’re looking to add more and more functions all of the time.

We should also talk about the license that Open Office has been distributed with. It’s currently distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License which states that anyone is allowed is download it for free and redistribute it as they like. This is absolutely great for you, the user. It means that you can benefit from Open Office without having to pay like you would with most other office suites available to date. Everyone loves open source software these days which is why we love that this is part of it. There are tons of extensions available all under the same license which means you can add even more functionality to the software, again without paying. There is a huge community surrounding Open Office, everyone just wants to help improve the experience you have by using it. Previous versions of the software have used other licenses which have very similar terms.

So what will happen next for Open Office? Nobody can be completely sure but what we can tell you is that Open Office is a software suite that you don’t want to miss out on. There are constant updates being released which will mean that you won’t have to wait long for extras to be added. There are also a lot of extensions and add ons available for you to use right now so we highly recommend that you go ahead and look for these if you’re interested in this.