For a decade, OpenOffice.org was the open-source movement’s answer to Microsoft Office. Sun Microsystems had open-sourced the StarOffice code in 2000 and sponsored the project, and it became the default office suite on most Linux distributions and a free alternative for millions of users. But the project was effectively controlled by Sun, which required contributors to assign copyright and held the trademark. That dependence on a single corporate steward turned out to be its central vulnerability.
In 2010 Oracle acquired Sun. The same acquisition that put MySQL and Java under Oracle’s control also swept up OpenOffice.org, and the community had little reason to expect Oracle to nurture a free office suite that competed with nothing in Oracle’s portfolio. Uncertainty about the project’s openness and governance reached a breaking point. Rather than wait to find out, long-time contributors acted. The Document Foundation’s history page records that “when The Document Foundation was announced in September 2010, we started with a team of long-term contributors to OpenOffice.org,” setting out to build “a new, open, independent, and meritocratic organization.”
On September 28, 2010 they announced both a new nonprofit, The Document Foundation, and a fork of the codebase under a new name, LibreOffice, chosen because the OpenOffice.org trademark stayed with Oracle. The fork was an act of governance rather than engineering: the code was the same, but the contributors wanted a home no single company could capture. Oracle was invited to participate and donate the trademark, but declined, and most of the active developer community moved to LibreOffice.
The original project then took an unusual path. In 2011 Oracle handed the OpenOffice.org code not to The Document Foundation but to the Apache Software Foundation. The Apache incubator’s project record notes simply that the project “enters incubation” on 2011-06-13, where it was relicensed under the permissive Apache License and renamed Apache OpenOffice. The two projects now had a shared ancestry but different licenses and different communities.
The outcome became a cautionary tale about momentum and stewardship. LibreOffice, carrying most of the developers and releasing rapidly under its independent foundation, became the most actively developed successor. Apache OpenOffice, staffed entirely by volunteers and unable to attract the same contributor base, slowed dramatically; by the mid-2010s its development had nearly stalled even as it retained a recognizable brand and millions of downloads. The fork showed that in open source, a project’s future follows its contributors and its governance, not its name or its corporate pedigree, and that the freedom to fork is the community’s ultimate safeguard against an unwelcome owner.