Apache Software Foundation has announced that OpenOffice has passed the milestone of 100 million downloads in less than two years since it became one of the main projects of the foundation.

The productivity suite is composed of six applications and is available in over 120 languages ​​on Windows, Mac and Linux. OpenOffice can be downloaded from SourceForge or from the Apache OpenOffice website, where users can find a store with more than 750 extensions and over 2,800 templates.

Given the importance of the event, it is useful to review briefly the history of OpenOffice. The ancestor of the suite is StarOffice, originally developed by the German StarDivision since 1985. Subsequent to its acquisition by Sun Microsystems (1999), StarOffice becomes open source and is distributed under the name of OpenOffice.org (2002). In 2010, Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle, which continues to develop the productivity suite by changing its name to Open Office. Due to disagreements with the leadership, many developers leave Oracle, and founded The Document Foundation to present the first version of LibreOffice (2011), currently included in most Linux distributions, including Ubuntu. A few months later, Oracle decided to donate the OpenOffice.org code to the Apache Foundation, which in 2012 became the Apache OpenOffice.

“I’m extremely pleased to see us reach this major milestone in less than two years,” said Andrea Pescetti, Vice President of Apache OpenOffice. “This is a testament to our community volunteers: the hundreds of talented individuals who make Apache OpenOffice what it is, who write the code, test for bugs, translate the user interface, write documentation, answer user questions and manage our servers. We remain committed to offering the successful combination of reliability and innovation that so many users appreciate.”

Currently, OpenOffice has been downloaded 122 million times with a daily peak of 250,000 downloads. The most recent version of the suite is the 4.0.1. Apache OpenOffice includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, a diagram editor, a manager database and equation editor.

With the way you pass this important milestone in the development of the project, the Apache Foundation has revealed some interesting information about the community and the OpenOffice software. And so the most popular packages are Windows users, then the users of OS X and Linux.

When it comes to the changes that were introduced in version 4.0, one of the most important was the introduction of handling Microsoft Active Accessibility and IAccessible2, so that the office suite became compatible with popular screen readers for the blind and visually impaired. These new options for Apache OpenOffice made an attractive choice for many public institutions such as the administrative region of Emilia-Romagna, Italy that recently announced a migration to OpenOffice. The latest release also offers Microsoft Office interoperability, enhancements to drawing/graphics, and performance improvements, among many others features.

The top 10 countries for OpenOffice downloads are United States, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, Canada, and Poland.

Microsoft Office and its subsequent move offering of Office 365 in the cloud may be preferred productivity suites in the business world, but apparently there is still room for competitors. OpenOffice.org’s rival, LibreOffice by The Document Foundation, is also gaining from the transit of the popular software to ASF. It offers quite a few more advanced tools including the Wiki Publisher and the number of customization options, and extensions makes it a lot more flexible for advanced users. Since its release, LibreOffice has become the default productivity installation of choice for a number of Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora.