Other Successful Open Source Software You Should Know

When people talk about open-source software, Linux and Android usually grab the headlines. But some of the most impactful open-source projects aren’t operating systems – they’re the everyday tools people use to write documents, browse the web, and manage their email. Three of those tools – OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox, and Ximian Evolution – each tell a distinct story about how community-driven software development can produce serious, enterprise-grade alternatives to proprietary products. Here’s a closer look at each of them.

OpenOffice.org: a free office suite for everyone 🔗

Apache OpenOffice, originally known as OpenOffice.org, is one of the most widely recognized open-source office productivity suites in the world. Its roots go back to a proprietary product called StarOffice, developed by a German company called Star Division. Sun Microsystems acquired Star Division in 1999 and open-sourced the software in July 2000, releasing it as a free alternative to Microsoft Office. The first stable version, OpenOffice.org 1.0, arrived on 1 May 2002.

The suite quickly gained traction. Within months of its launch, it had accumulated millions of downloads and tens of thousands of registered community members. By 2010, its user base was estimated to exceed 100 million people globally.

What’s inside the suite? 🔗

Apache OpenOffice includes six core applications: Writer for word processing, Calc for spreadsheets, Impress for presentations, Draw for vector graphics, Base for database management, and Math for editing equations. These cover essentially the same ground as Microsoft Office, and the suite is available in over 110 languages, making it accessible to users around the world. It runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS, and stores documents in the internationally recognized OpenDocument Format (ODF) – a vendor-neutral standard. It can also read and write files in Microsoft Office formats.

One of its most significant advantages is cost: Apache OpenOffice can be downloaded and used entirely free of charge, for any purpose – personal, commercial, educational, or governmental. There are no license fees and no restrictions on the number of installations.

From Sun to Oracle to Apache 🔗

The project changed hands a few times over the years. After Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, it significantly reduced developer resources allocated to OpenOffice.org. A large portion of the community left the project in 2010 and formed The Document Foundation, launching a fork called LibreOffice in January 2011, which quickly became the version bundled with most Linux distributions. Oracle eventually donated the entire OpenOffice.org codebase to the Apache Software Foundation in June 2011, where it has continued as Apache OpenOffice. The most recent release, version 4.1.16, was published in November 2025.

The Italian region of Emilia-Romagna offers a concrete example of the cost savings open-source office software makes possible – the region announced in 2013 that switching to OpenOffice would save it 2 million euros. A similar pattern was observed when some large government agencies found that migrating to OpenOffice cost only a tenth of what upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007 would have.

Mozilla Firefox: the browser that took on Internet Explorer 🔗

Mozilla Firefox stands as perhaps the most famous example of open-source software reshaping an entire industry. It emerged from a long lineage tracing back to Netscape Navigator, the browser that dominated the early web before Microsoft’s Internet Explorer pushed it aside.

The origin story begins in 1998, when Netscape released its browser’s source code to the public, intending to harness the creative energy of thousands of internet developers. This gave birth to the Mozilla project. By 2002, the community had grown well beyond just building a Netscape successor – contributors were experimenting with standalone browsers, development tools, and entirely new directions. That same year, Mozilla community members created a lightweight standalone browser initially codenamed Phoenix, aiming to offer the best possible browsing experience for the widest possible audience.

From Phoenix to Firefox 🔗

The browser went through a few name changes before settling on its now-iconic identity. Trademark disputes first forced a rename from Phoenix to Firebird, and then in 2004 to Firefox, to avoid confusion with other existing projects. The team behind it, led by developers Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross, was focused on building something fast, lightweight, and highly customizable.

Firefox 1.0 launched in November 2004 and immediately began chipping away at Internet Explorer’s near-total dominance. It offered tabbed browsing, integrated search, pop-up blocking, and a growing library of extensions – features that felt genuinely new to most users at the time. Firefox 3.0 set a Guinness World Record by being downloaded over 8 million times in a single day. By July 2009, cumulative downloads had crossed one billion, making it the most widely used open-source software application in the world.

What makes Firefox different? 🔗

Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, and is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. Its source code is released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) version 2.0, which allows anyone to view, modify, or redistribute it. This openness has led to several well-known spin-offs, including the Tor Browser (used for anonymous browsing) and Pale Moon.

Firefox’s development model is community-powered. The SUMO platform (support.mozilla.org), launched in 2007, provides an open-source community support channel where volunteer contributors assist users and help improve the browser. Firefox also introduced WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication), which allowed video and voice calls directly between browsers without plugins – a breakthrough for open web standards. In 2017, Firefox Quantum brought a significant speed upgrade, using Mozilla’s Rust programming language to make browsing twice as fast while using 30% less memory than Chrome.

Today, Firefox remains one of the few major browsers not built on Google’s Chromium engine, making it a critical piece of infrastructure for a diverse, competitive, and open web.

Ximian Evolution: bringing Outlook-style functionality to Linux 🔗

While OpenOffice and Firefox addressed productivity and browsing, there was another major gap in the Linux desktop experience: a capable, professional personal information manager (PIM). Corporate users needed email, calendar, contacts, and task management integrated into a single application – the kind of experience Microsoft Outlook provided on Windows. That gap is what Ximian Evolution set out to fill.

Ximian was an American open-source software company founded in October 1999 by Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman, two prominent contributors to the GNOME desktop project. The company began developing Evolution in 2000, driven by a clear observation: there were no email clients for Linux at the time that could provide the functionality and interoperability necessary for corporate users. Ximian saw this as an opportunity – if Linux could offer the right enterprise software, it could expand meaningfully into corporate environments.

Features and functionality 🔗

Evolution brings together email, calendar, address book, tasks, and notes into a single integrated platform. It supports standard protocols – IMAP and POP for receiving mail, SMTP for sending – as well as secure connections via SSL, TLS, and STARTTLS. It includes email encryption through GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) and S/MIME, automatic spam filtering via SpamAssassin and Bogofilter, and calendar support for the iCalendar format, WebDAV, CalDAV, and Google Calendar.

One particularly notable feature was its ability to connect with Microsoft Exchange Server, which was the backbone of corporate email infrastructure. Ximian released Evolution 1.0 in December 2001, along with a paid plug-in called Ximian Connector, which allowed users to connect to Microsoft Exchange. This meant Linux users could participate in the same groupware environment as their Windows-using colleagues – a significant step forward for Linux adoption in workplaces.

From Ximian to GNOME 🔗

Ximian was acquired by Novell in August 2003. Novell subsequently open-sourced the Exchange Connector, releasing it as part of the fully free Evolution 2.0 in May 2004. That same version was also incorporated into the GNOME 2.8 desktop release in September 2004, making Evolution the official PIM for one of Linux’s most widely used desktop environments. Since then, it has passed through the stewardship of SUSE and Red Hat, and today it remains an active GNOME application available across major Linux distributions including Fedora and Debian, with the recommended installation method now being through Flatpak via Flathub.

The name “Evolution” was deliberately chosen – it symbolized advancement beyond the simpler, fragmented GNOME tools that existed before it, like the Balsa email client and GnomeCal calendar application. That ambition was realized: Evolution became a stable, enterprise-grade tool that demonstrated open-source software could meet professional productivity standards.

What these three tools share 🔗

OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox, and Ximian Evolution each addressed a specific, practical need that proprietary software dominated. Each was built on open standards, released under licenses that permitted free use and modification, and developed with meaningful community involvement. Together, they represent a period in the early 2000s when the open-source movement proved it could compete at the highest level – not just in infrastructure, but in the everyday tools that define how people work and communicate. Their influence continues today: Apache OpenOffice has been downloaded over 333 million times, Firefox helped define the modern web, and Evolution remains the standard PIM for the GNOME desktop.

What do you think? As proprietary software suites grow more subscription-based and cloud-dependent, do open-source alternatives like these become more or less relevant to ordinary users? And given how much of today’s internet infrastructure runs on open-source software, why do you think open-source desktop applications still struggle to reach mainstream adoption?

References

1. https://www.openoffice.org/about/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org
3. https://www.openoffice.org/why/
4. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/History
5. https://www.openoffice.org/
6. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/history/
7. https://www.britannica.com/technology/Firefox-Web-browser
8. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-milestones/
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox
10. https://grokipedia.com/page/Ximian
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Evolution
12. https://gizmodo.com/download/evolution