"OpenOffice.org itself was originally based on StarOffice which Sun acquired back in 1999.
"OpenOffice.org is free (as in beer and as in Freedom) and is also offered as a supported commercial offering by Linux vendors including Red Hat, Novell and Ubuntu. As far as I know StarOffice is not free in the same sense. The current StarOffice 8 is being sold by Sun for $69.95 and the licensing terms are not quite open."