A long time ago, there was a free-as-in-software office productivity suite called "OpenOffice.org" yes, that awkward name was how it was branded. This isn't how it started, but it's how it was at a certain point years ago when our story begins.

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.