Star Division

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.

Star Division

Company type	Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung
Industry	Computer software
Founded	1985; 40 years ago (1985) in Lüneburg, Germany
Founder	Marco Börries
Defunct	August 5, 2000; 24 years ago (2000-08-05)
Fate	Acquired by Sun Microsystems
Headquarters	Hamburg , Germany
Products	StarOffice
Number of employees	170 (1997)

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.^{[citation needed]} In 1998, Star Division made the software freely available for private use.^{[citation needed]} The following year, on 5 August 1999, the company was acquired by Sun Microsystems for US$59.5 million,^[1] reportedly because acquiring the company was more cost-effective than licensing Microsoft Office for its employees.^[2]

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.^{[citation needed]}