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openoffice.org package

How does OpenOffice operate financially? How can it be free?

Asked by siccarii

Oh, this isn't complicated. I just wondered after owning several business, how do finance this without a cost? I'm very impressed with the clean and professional front you have, not to mention the array of categories. I guess I'm pretty old to not understand, and I started with Word Perfect in the 1980's. Your sophistication is beyond anything I imagined when someone told me about your site. How do you do it?
Thank you very much, siccarii

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arochester (arochester) said : 		#1

Why not ask OpenOffice instead of Ubuntu? http://www.openoffice.org/

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mycae (mycae) said : 		#2

openoffice was originally funded as a project by Sun Microsystems. The idea was to develop an office suite which could be deployed to large systems (think hundreds of thousands of users, and then the money could be made by managing deployments.). Sun eventually were purchased by oracle, who are currently maintaining a similar stance.

To aid their development, they chose an open model, where external volunteers could contribute.

Now, ubuntu is moving to a so-called "fork" of the project known as "libreoffice" (same initial code, different organisational structure), which does not have a commercial backing per se, and is made up of volunteer developers.

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Jeb E. (jebeld17) said : 		#3

Openoffice is free because the people that create the program are so passionate about what they do, and so passionate about the whole "open source" philosophy, they even offer their program to everybody for free, as long as they stay within the (very loose) license terms

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