Star Division

Star Division was a German software company best known for creating StarOffice, a proprietary office suite. Marco Börries founded it in 1985, at the age of sixteen, in Lüneburg, and it began as a small startup. Its first product was the word processor StarWriter, which later grew into the full StarOffice suite. StarOffice was positioned as a cheaper alternative to Microsoft Office and sold more than 25 million copies worldwide; by the late 1990s it was estimated to hold about a quarter of the German office suite market. In 1998 the company made the software free for private use. On 5 August 1999 Sun Microsystems bought Star Division for US$59.5 million, reportedly because that was more cost-effective than licensing Microsoft Office for Sun's own staff. Sun then released StarOffice 5.1a free for commercial use and later open-sourced the code as OpenOffice.org, the basis of related projects such as LibreOffice.