What is OpenOffice.org?
OpenOffice.org is both an Open Source product and a project. The product is a multi-platform office productivity suite. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. Sophisticated and flexible, OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office.History and Background
When examining its yearly accounts, Sun Microsystems realized that it was paying Microsoft millions of dollars in licensing fees and upgrade charges. Meanwhile, Solaris, Sun's own operating system, was suffering from the lack of available Office productivity tools. They considered developing an office suite of their own. It would benefit Solaris and Sun Microsystems could even save money in the process.
Developing an office suite is a big challenge. Since a majority of people use the Microsoft Office suite and any new rival must be able to support file formats for Word, Excel, and Power Point. The problem is, Microsoft does not make the file formats public so the way each program runs is a company secret.
Luckily, Sun found a group of German programmers called Star Division to reverse engineer Microsoft's Office suite. As a result, Star Division produced a product called StarOffice. Sun bought StarDivision and invested its money, which it would usually pay to Microsoft for their fees, to create a rival office suite that could compete with Microsoft. Sun's bold move was to release the source code to make OpenOffice available under LGPL and SISSL.