6.3.1. History
Throughout the last decade the office domain has typically been dominated by MS Office, and, let's face it: the Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats are industry standards that you will have to deal with sooner or later.
This monopoly situation of Microsoft proved to be a big disadvantage for getting new users to Linux, so a group of German developers started the StarOffice project, that was, and is still, aimed at making an MS Office clone. Their company, StarDivision, was acquired by Sun Microsystems by the end of the 1990s, just before the 5.2 release. Sun continues development but restricted access to the sources. Nevertheless, development on the original set of sources continues in the Open Source community, which had to rename the project to OpenOffice. OpenOffice is now available for a variety of platforms, including MS Windows, Linux, MacOS and Solaris. There is a screenshot in Section 1.3.2 .
Almost simultaneously, a couple of other quite famous projects took off. Also a very common alternative to using MS Office is KOffice, the office suite that used to be popular among SuSE users. Like the original, this clone incorporates an MS Word and Excel compatible program, and much more.
Smaller projects deal with particular programs of the MS example suite, such as Abiword and MS Wordview for compatibility with MS Word documents, and Gnumeric for viewing and creating Excel compatible spreadsheets.
* License
