CyberNet News has a nice coverage of StarOffice / OpenOffice.org / LibreOffice history.
- August 1999 – Sun Microsystems buys a company (StarDivision) and gets StarOffice.
- October 2000 – An open source version of StarOffice, called OpenOffice.org, was released.
- … almost 10 years goes by with several major and successful OpenOffice.org releases.
- January 2010 – Oracle buys Sun Microsystems.
- September 2010 – Some members that worked on OpenOffice.org started “The Document Foundation” due to concern over the future of OpenOffice.org now that Oracle owns it. The concerns were understood since Oracle took the OpenSolaris project, which had been around for nearly 20-years, and discontinued open development of it.
- January 2011 – OpenOffice.org 3.3 released.
- January 2011 – LibreOffice 3.3 was released (based on OpenOffice.org 3.3). This is the first stable version of the product.
- April 2011 – Oracle announces that it will no longer be supporting development of OpenOffice.org.
- June 2011 – Oracle announces that they will contribute OpenOffice.org (the trademark and the code) to the Apache Software Foundation.
- June 2011 – LibreOffice 3.4 released.
- February 2012 – LibreOffice 3.5 released.
- May 2012 – Apache OpenOffice 3.4 released. Note that it’s not called “OpenOffice.org” anymore, and is instead called “Apache OpenOffice”.