It all started with OpenOffice. The application originated as a commercial office product from the German company Star Division. The company launched StarOffice 3.0, an office solution for Windows, OS/2 and Mac in 1995. Star Division was bought by the Californian Sun Microsystems in 1999 - in the same year Sun StarOffice 5.2 was released. This was the precursor to OpenOffice: one year later the source code of StarOffice was released, so that developers could see it and use it for their purposes.
Thus OpenOffice.org was born and the spread of the free software took its course. OpenOffice is an open-source application because of its use of open source code, which is reflected in the name. This means that users can make their own adjustments or use parts of the OpenOffice code for their own purposes by accessing the source code.
10 years after OpenOffice emerged, Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, who discontinued the product “StarOffice” which has since been renamed Oracle Open Office. The commercial version of the office solution disappeared. OpenOffice was renamed Apache OpenOffice.org.
The takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle also marks the start of LibreOffice. The US company Oracle was aiming for profit, and so some developers moved away, subsequently establishing their own foundation called “The Document Foundation” and have since continued their vision of the OpenOffice project under the name LibreOffice. According to an analysis by the Foundation, there were around 200 million LibreOffice users worldwide in 2018, many of which are Linux users.