StarOffice 8, built on OpenOffice and licensed for a fee by Sun, has always been available for free for education. There are certain advantages. StarOffice differs from OpenOffice (see pp. 2-5) in that Sun provides additional features not available with the open source version such as customer support, additional fonts, a better spellcheck dictionary, many templates, and a clipart library.

Earlier this month, Google began offering StarOffice as part of their GooglePack of downloadable software, making it freely available to anyone.