The Document Foundation forked OpenOffice in 2010 and made the open suite unkillable

The open-source office suite OpenOffice.org began life as StarOffice, a proprietary product whose roots reach 1985. Sun Microsystems bought it in 1999 and released the source as OpenOffice.org in 2000, giving the free-software world its main alternative to Microsoft Office. When Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, it froze development, made the bug trackers private, pushed out long-time contributors and tried to sell the project as a commercial product — a decade of community work suddenly sat under a hostile owner.

The developers' move was to leave before Oracle could consolidate control. In late 2010 the core team announced The Document Foundation and forked the whole codebase as LibreOffice under neutral nonprofit governance. The free license made the fork legal without Oracle's consent, and the bet was that the real asset was the community, not the brand: contributors, distributors and users follow working code, so Oracle would be left holding an empty name.

The bet held. Oracle donated the shell to Apache in 2011, but by then most contributors had already moved on. Apache OpenOffice has shipped no major release since 2014 and still carries unfixed security issues, while LibreOffice — tracing its lineage to StarWriter's 1985 debut — remains actively developed forty years later, adding browser-based builds and real-time collaboration, and is still the default open office suite.

Fork to neutral governance while the license still allows it

Sun's 2000 open-source release made the fork lawful: when Oracle turned hostile, the community needed nobody's permission to take the code and keep it alive.

The fork happened before Oracle consolidated, so it captured the asset that mattered — the developers — and Oracle and later Apache inherited a recognizable name with no team behind it.

Neutral nonprofit governance removed the single-owner failure mode, giving volunteers and downstream distributors a reason to commit to the project for the long term.

Users could tell the difference through maintenance alone: LibreOffice kept shipping fixes while the OpenOffice name decayed, so the living project, not the famous one, became the standard.

When a standard's real asset is its community, openness is the insurance: a hostile owner can be outflanked by a lawful fork, and the living project becomes the standard users trust.

Apache OpenOffice still exists but is effectively dormant: no major release since 2014, a handful of contributors against LibreOffice's 1,300-plus, and security issues more than a year old — which led The Document Foundation to publicly ask Apache to retire it in 2020. LibreOffice kept the 40-year StarOffice lineage alive: by 2025 it had gained WASM browser builds and CRDT-based real-time collaboration, and the anniversary coverage drew 555 points and 232 comments on Hacker News.