In fact, I have been using StarOffice (the closed source commercial product that sparked OpenOffice after its code was open sourced) since version 3.0 beta back in 1996.
What is today OpenOffice was developed by German software company Stardivision Gmbh, and dubbed "StarOffice".
Sun Microsystems bought the firm and released two freeware (but closed source) releases: 5.1, and 5.2. By the time StarOffice 6.0 its source code was released under the GNU GPL license and OpenOffice was born.
People who "hate" openoffice was often badly burned by the slowness of OpenOffice pre-1.1 or OpenOffice from 2.0 until 2.2. In the meantime, Novell, Sun, and others optimized the 2.x code to make startup much faster, which shows in OpenOffice 2.2.
BTW: OpenOffice 3.0.1 has been released last week or so.
Sun Microsystems continues periodically taking the OpenOffice code, adding some commercial additions to it (comercial spellchecker/dictionaries, fonts and clipart) and selling it as "StarOffice" with support. Thus, what is OpenOffice 3.01 can be bought comercially as StarOffice 9.0, which includes tech support.
I buy StarOffice with every new release, as a way to fund the advancement of the Free Software version (after all, most of the programmers contributing to OpenOffice.org are on Sun's payroll).
FC