"Openoffice.org was started as a community project (it just turned one year old) whereby the source code of certain parts of Staroffice were released to the public for volunteers to work on and improve upon them. While these improvements will always be made freely available, Sun Microsystems reserves the right to incorporate some or all these improvements to StarOffice which is still a closed-source project. For those of you who are familiar with the Netscape/Mozilla story, it is the same dual-licensing model that Sun Microsystems is using. You might be wondering that if that is the case, StarOffice will always be the better product.
"However, this may not exactly so since Openoffice.org is constantly being improved by expert programmers, users through their bugs reports and feature requests, technical writers with their excellent documentation all around the world. Improvements are being made available very quickly in the form of frequent software upgrades (could be in the space of a few weeks) while as new versions of Staroffice (and Microsoft Office) are typically only made available between programmed intervals of several months. In addition, Openoffice.org provides cross-platform capabilities and document interoperability (it has a XML-based file format)..."
