StarDivision, the original author of StarOffice, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released during June of 2000. Future versions of StarOffice, beginning with 6.0, will be built using the OpenOffice sources, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation.

The OpenOffice.org technology will include using GTK+ from the current VCL widgets and the component model will be unified with the Bonobo component system. OpenOffice.org will deliver separate applications/components which allow integration into platform user environments.