Star Division was a German software company best known for developing StarOffice, a proprietary office suite. The company was founded in 1985 by 16-year-old Marco Börries in Lüneburg, and initially operated as a small startup. Its first product was StarWriter, a word processor that later evolved into the StarOffice suite.
Positioned as a lower-cost alternative to Microsoft Office, StarOffice achieved over 25 million sales worldwide and held an estimated 25% share of the office suite market in Germany by the late 1990s. In 1998, Star Division made the software freely available for private use. The following year, on 5 August 1999, the company was acquired by Sun Microsystems for US$59.5 million, reportedly because acquiring the company was more cost-effective than licensing Microsoft Office for its employees.
Sun subsequently released StarOffice 5.1a free for commercial use and later open-sourced the software as OpenOffice.org, which served as the basis for related projects such as LibreOffice. Sun was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010.
References
External links Star Division, Inc. (archived web site from 1996-12-19 to 1998-04-22) Star Division GmbH (archived web site from 1996-12-19 to 1998-02-13)