There is rarely a name that is just a name. Names often have connotations that bring baggage with them.

When the OpenOffice project was accepted by Apache, there was a distinct community around it which was larger than it is today. Now that the community has shrunk, you are seeing the people in it wrestle with how best to go forward responsibly.

“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and… ”

Naming things and off by one errors

As a technologist who follows tech news, I was never sure which one was the more active/appropriate prohect. Switching to Google Docs and various plain markdown editors has been a huge relief.

A few years ago I said fuck it and bought MS Office. I may only need it once a year when markdown or gDocs doesn't suffice, but the price is worth avoiding the OpenOffice vs LibreOffice fuckery. It also works better.

Wikipedia is usually pretty good at giving an overview of the situation.

> In September 2010, the majority of outside OpenOffice.org developers left the project, due to concerns over Sun and then Oracle's management of the project

> […]

> In April 2011, Oracle stopped development of OpenOffice.org

— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#History

But the OpenOffice brand was already built, so obviously a lot of people still think it is the most active project.

Presumably, Oracle did not know what to do with this asset they bought, but they thought they might be able to squeeze value out of it. They believed the only way to do so was to have total control over it, which removed all value from it (except for the brand). Then they put it in an Apache-shaped trash, along with the brand.

Development of OpenOffice continued after it landed at Apache, notably in the form of a large IBM donation of code from Symfony. It is only recently that maintaining the project has become an issue, and as the OP illustrates, the remaining community is engaged and grappling with how to deal with that.

It's important to note, by the way, that Oracle had taken the Star Division developers off OOo and put them on their abortive CloudOffice endeavour. So the outside developers leaving was actually most of the active development resources at the time.