Just as a note since it’s not 100% clear which project you’re talking about, LibreOffice and OpenOffice are now two different projects. One is just a fork of the other.
LibreOffice (the topic of this article and version change) isn’t very sad imo!
LibreOffice (the topic of this article and version change) isn’t very sad imo!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#LibreOffice
Apparently there was also some footdragging by Sun (because Sun) and later Oracle (because evil) about creating a neutral caretaker foundation to guide development.
Circa 2010/11, the development community decided to do it themselves.
Shortly after, Oracle killed it completely and fired the remaining staff, however IBM convinced Apache to take it over and re-release it under a more permissive license. Now, OpenOffice is basically a zombie of a project that refuses to die and hasn't seen any new feature upgrades since 2014, while LibreOffice releases ~2 feature upgrades every year.
But it's not completely dead. It does receive some bug fixes and security patches from time to time.
When everyone jumped to LibreOffice, rather then handing it over to LibreOffice, they let it to go live on a farm where all big projects go to die: The Apache Foundation.
The upside is they did assign everything including patents and trademarks to the Apache project though and relicensed everything under Apache's license where LibreOffice is still LGPLv3/Mozilla Public License (MPL) from back when it forked.
So, why has the Apache Foundation basically become synonymous with final resting place for everything under their stewardship?
1: fun fact, Apache ran 50% of websites in 2009, by 2022 this share fell below 25%.
Funny, I would have expected the 2009 number to be higher, and the 2022 number to be (much) lower. Apache ain't doing bad, as it turns out.
But very few of us are starting new projects based on Apache. Even when I have to deploy PHP for clients I usually go for stuff like Caddy which is built for the 2020s and and entire Wordpress config, boilerplate included, is less than 30 lines.
That 25% figure is basically inertia.
I think it's because they accept so many project, but people misunderstand what the Apache Foundation does. Companies and researchers often seem to have the idea that they can just throw their code over the fence and Apache will have a team of developers ready to pick their stuff up.
All the successful Apache projects are those where the developers just need hosting, guidance and perhaps legal assistance, but they themselves stay on as the developers.
Apache shouldn't have accepted OpenOffice, but perhaps they where affair that we'd be left without an office suite.
Apache isn't far behind nginx currently.
There is another similar farm nearby named the Eclipse Foundation. Well, just like Apache, they have some projects which are very much alive; but, just as Oracle sent OpenOffice off to Apache's pastures, they similarly sent Hudson off to Eclipse's. Unlike OpenOffice, Hudson has already shuffled off to the great beyond; OpenOffice still clings to life, if barely.
It's probably pining for the fjords.
OpenOffice.org was owned by Sun, who had purchased StarOffice for their internal use and, since it was the trend at the time, decided to Open Source it, creating OpenOffice.org. At first it was under a weird Sun license, but eventually Sun LGPL'd it.
Working with Sun was very annoying, but it got much worse once Oracle bought them in 2010. Officially Oracle continued to support OpenOffice, now "Oracle OpenOffice" but a lot of non-Sun people who worked on OpenOffice.org eventually formed The Document Foundation, which still exist todays and produces LibreOffice. Most third party work on the software moved to TDF and thus LibreOffice.
But, Oracle still owned the OpenOffice name, and with it the brand awareness. They could give this to TDF, but how does that enrich Larry? It doesn't. So, they "gave" the project, branding and source code (including code which wasn't yet LGPL'd) to the Apache Foundation. You can go back and look at the public comments on this "adoption" and see that, very unusually, there is strong opposition to Apache taking this, and thus enabling what is clearly a nasty outcome for end users.
Apache's board members bizarrely claim not to remember any such reaction (publicly recorded in their own archives) and say they believed that this was a strong, successful community, which is weird because again their own records show they repeatedly had problems with its "leadership" which were engineers now employed by IBM, basically to work on an IBM project that re-used this source (hence not being keen on LGPL) from Oracle. So for a few years you have a situation where there's an abusive jerk who is "Vice President" of Apache OpenOffice, the Apache management pretend not to notice, and instead are incensed that the TDF people seem to think this is Apache's fault...
And then IBM loses interest and so "Apache OpenOffice" is dead. But Apache aren't willing to throw in the towel, that would be too much like admitting everybody else was correct years ago. So it carries on as a zombie. In early September 2016 (ie Seven Years Ago) I wrote this about the prospects for the project:
""If in say, three months, there's no measurable evidence that AOO is back on course then regardless of what is said by the handful of AOO people, retirement is the right choice.
For example, shipping AOO 4.2 in 10 weeks at ApacheConEU. That's not crazy. Libreoffice goes from feature freeze to release in 10 weeks. A healthy AOO development community should be able to do it, or come so close as to leave no-one in any doubt.""
What happened to AOO 4.2 ? Did they ship it in 10 weeks at ApacheConEU ? No they did not.
OK, but how late was it? It has never shipped. In the subsequent seven years AOO has never shipped a feature release, just small bug fixes for their already outdated software. For a while they used to speculate that they'd release it "next year" but they eventually gave up even pretending. It's dead, it's just a zombie project, the main thing the remaining "project members" can be bothered to put effort into is denying that it's dead. Anybody who writes actual software is working with TDF.
It would still be interesting to know whether there's some larger reason Apache agreed to help Oracle do this. Did the Foundation get paid? Did its board? But in practical terms Apache is indeed where things go to die and OpenOffice helped seal that reputation.