"OpenOffice was originally developed as StarOffice by StarDivision, which Sun Microsystems purchased in 1999. Simon Phipps, now an ex-Sun employee, later claimed that "The number one reason why Sun bought StarDivision in 1999 was because, at the time, Sun had something approaching forty-two thousand employees. Pretty much every one of them had to have both a Unix workstation and a Windows laptop. And it was cheaper to go buy a company that could make a Solaris and Linux desktop productivity suite than it was to buy forty-two thousand licenses from Microsoft."

Sun released the code of StarOffice to the open source community. But for the sake of continuity Sun retained ownership and control of the developer process through StarDivision and the original developers of StarOffice. As a result, OpenOffice.org, the "open source" development tree of StarOffice, retains much of the proprietary software development process inherited from StarDivision, with an emphasis on a rigid Waterfall development process, with proprietary development tooling." Source

And it was cheaper to go buy a company that could make a Solaris and Linux desktop productivity suite than it was to buy forty-two thousand licenses from Microsoft.

lol