Published at LXer:

The purchase of StarDivision, the makers of StarOffice, a German office "productivity suite", by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. The subsequent release to the free software community of the StarOffice code, in the shape of OpenOffice, came as a surprise to many. Sun was a hardware company. Its primary business was back room servers, and Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystem's CEO, was not a fan of office productivity suites. Quite the opposite. Back in October 1996, McNealy had announced to the National Press Club of Australia: "When the anthropologists look back on the 1980s and 1990s and do the archaeological digs, and get their calipers and brooms and microscopes out, they will blame the massive reduction in productivity during the 1980s and 1990s entirely on Microsoft Office."

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