The free and open productivity suite

StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, 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 in June of 2000. Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation. Sun continues to sponsor development on OpenOffice.org and is the primary contributor of code to OpenOffice.org. CollabNet hosts the website infrastructure for development of the product and helps manage the project.

The OpenOffice.org source code includes the technology which Sun Microsystems has been developing for the future versions of StarOffice(TM) software. The source is written in C++ and delivers language-neutral and scriptable functionality, including Java(TM) APIs. This source technology introduces the next-stage architecture, allowing use of the suite as separate applications or as embedded components in other applications. Numerous other features are also present including XML-based file formats based on the vendor-neutral OpenDocument standard from OASIS and other resources.

A FAQ addresses the changing differences between OpenOffice.org and StarOffice.

OpenOffice.org uses the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License). For documentation and website content not intended to be included in the product, we use the Public Documentation License (PDL). Our License page provides more information on our licenses and on our policies regarding the application of those licenses. As well, our we have several FAQs dealing with licensing.

The Three Main Categories

"OpenOffice.org," the overall project, comprises many public projects. There are three main categories:

• Accepted
• Native-Lang
• Incubator

Each category further houses many projects and sub-projects.

Accepted Projects includes most of the technical projects as well as some non-technical projects. Projects leads of those projects in this category have voting rights. This category includes the leads of both Native-Lang and Incubator, thus ensuring that community interests are well-represented.

Native-Lang (also known as " The Native Language Confederation") houses native-language projects: areas in OpenOffice.org in languages other than English dedicated to providing information, resources, and assistance to users of OpenOffice.org.

Incubator is the general category for community-sponsored projects. This category is also for experimental, and often small projects. After six months, a project housed here may petition to move to Accepted Projects category.

Each project in OpenOffice.org is a focused, collaborative group with members and a lead, to whom you should address your questions regarding project and list management. Members can be part of more than one project, and a lead of one project may be a member of another. The structure is meant to foster collaboration and cross-discipline synergy, and it does. For a list of projects and their leads, please see our Projects and Leads page.

Finally, each project has its own associated mailing lists. To understand the structure of the mailing lists, please go to our central Mail List page.

About the Structure

The "www" project only provides the general "façade" to the world; and it is our primary public face. It is what you see when you look at the homepage and all those pages that are of the form, "http://www.openoffice.org/abc/xyz.html". The crucial thing to look at is what comes before ".openoffice.org". Particular projects are all of the form "http://[project].openoffice.org/abc/xyz.html". Instead of "www" we have the project name.

There are a variety of ways you can actively participate in the OpenOffice.org Community. These range from something as easy as a monetary donation, and participating in mailing lists, to actually contributing code for the product. In any case, the entire OpenOffice.org project uses guidelines that define the roles and responsibilities of members, as well as describe how the source is maintained. For more information, please review our Guidelines for Participation.

To-Dos

Our "To-Dos" page lists the current tasks that need to be done. They range from the difficult to the simple, and we urge all members to consult the page prior to embarking on a new project. Additionally, there may be "To-Dos" listed on individual project main pages.

Joining

OpenOffice.org is an Open Source project. This means, first, that we offer not only a product but a process, and second, that we depend upon the contributions of developers and endusers to make that process happen. The easiest way for you to help us out is to join the overall OpenOffice.org project by registering.

Once you join the overall project, you are a contributor! You'll be able to file issues, bugs, patches, or comment on already filed issues. You'll be able intensify your participation and join an individual project, and subscribe to an individual project's mailing lists (listed on each project's home page using the Mailing Lists link). We encourage everyone interested in creating good software to join the OpenOffice.org. This is a democratic project and we want the best possible office suite that depends on community involvement. There is no requirement that you be a programmer. Just that you respect the other members of the community and understand that we are very serious about this Project and what it means.

Subscribing

Much of the excitement of an Open Source site takes place in the mailing lists. You don't have to be a registered member of OpenOffice.org to subscribe to our mailing lists, and subscribing obligates you to nothing (except receiving some interesting mail). If you are curious, interested, but not quite ready yet to take the plunge and join, we suggest you subscribe.

For questions having to do with the OpenOffice.org product, please use our "users" list: users@openoffice.org. Do not send product-related mail to dev@website.

Besides that list, we have two general lists: our "announce" list, which is for major announcements only, and the "discuss" list, which is for general discussions related to the project, its goals, and to Open Source in general.

To subscribe to any of these lists, click on the appropriate link below and send the email message. Leave the subject line and body empty.

• announce-subscribe@openoffice.org
  
• users-subscribe@openoffice.org
  
• discuss-subscribe@openoffice.org

In addition, our main mailing list page features all the more popular lists. You can also subscribe from that page to a digest versions of the more popular lists.

Interested in becoming a community distributor? Or in linking your site to OpenOffice.org? If so, please go to our "OpenOffice.org in a Nutshell" page. It contains all the information you need to link to our site

OpenOffice.org is governed by an elected body, the Community Council. The Community Council is responsible for mediating conflicts, suggesting Project goals, and generally providing a forum for the adjudication of issues of concern to the overall project.

The Engineering Steering Committee (ESC) is responsible for advising the Community Council of technical implementation. Constituted by senior developers appointed by the CC, the ESC is further charged with improving the code submission process.

Unique among Open Source project, OpenOffice.org has a Marketing Project. Among its accomplishments is the creation of a list of contacts responsible for furthering OpenOffice.org.

Since the beginning of the Project we have been maintaining statistics on downloads, Web access, and mail list activity. Not only do the statistics showcase OpenOffice.org's popularity and suggest roughly how many users there are worldwide but they also provide interesting data for researchers.

• Stats Project