It is a trademark issue. Someone else has OpenOffice trademarked. See TechRepublic at: http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6055020.html
Here is an excerpt: Where did OpenOffice.org 2.0 come from? Let's start with a history lesson. Even though you've been a Microsoft Office user, chances are good that you've heard the name OpenOffice.org before. However, you probably assumed that the office suite was primarily used to promote the use of Linux as a viable desktop operating system worthy of competing with Windows. To some extent that's probably true. While it would be much easier to simply call the product OpenOffice, that name is trademarked by another company. As such, the official name of the product is OpenOffice.org, which naturally leads to the unique abbreviation of OOo. However, OpenOffice.org was actually born out of Sun Microsystems' 1999 acquisition of a German company called Star Division that had created a notable office suite called StarOffice. Sun purchased StarOffice as a means to compete with Microsoft for a share of the office suite market. In 2000, Sun launched StarOffice into the open-source arena as OpenOffice.org in order to increase its popularity and to promote innovative design from the open source community. In addition to Sun programmers and a cadre of open source developers, Red Hat, Novell, Intel, and a company called Propylon, which focuses on automation solutions for legislative and regulatory documentation, all work together on the creation of OpenOffice.org While OpenOffice.org is free, Sun, which is the primary sponsor of the project, still offers a commercial version of StarOffice that gets its code-base from OpenOffice.org. From time to time, Sun takes the OpenOffice.org code base, integrates proprietary features, and releases the combined product as a new version of StarOffice. In fact, a month before OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released, Sun released StarOffice 8, which includes all of the new features found in OpenOffice.org 2.0 as well as a host of additional features." Hope this helps Lee Heavlin -----Original Message----- From: Andy Brown [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 2:51 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [marketing] The name OpenOffice.org I know that there is an explanation somewhere as to why OpenOffice.org is used but can not seem to find it. Can someone send me a link? Thanks in advance. Andy --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
