OpenOffice is alive and well and living at Apache
Unfortunately this article was very poorly researched and is completely misleading and many of the comments listed here are lacking in the understanding of some important nuance.
The Project formally known as OpenOffice.org is a combination of community members/developers. a copyrighted codebase, a group of related trademarks and some infrastructure to facilitate community interaction and code download (and a few other bits and pieces). Oracle donated the code and trademark and websites et al to the Apache foundation where it is now incarnated as Apache OpenOffice. It is what is referred to as a podling for the time being and a community of developers which includes some significant corporate support (which will be growing in numbers and diversity), are hard at work on doing a lot of code clean up, adding new features, and will soon be integrating the very large code donation from IBM's Symphony project.
TeamOpenOffice, the Hamburg group referred to in the article, was originally set up as a means of collecting donations to support things like conferences. Much of these donations came in from a "donate here" button which encourages paypall donations. Because of circumstances this group has been cut off from that source of funding. Furthermore members of that group wish to do active programing in support of the OpenOffice project, which is a great thing that I support enthusiastically. However, they do not represent the OpenOffice project at Apache, Their financial situation and plaintive request does not reflect on the health of the Apache project, and they do not have rights to use the OpenOffice.org trademark and their use of it, and the resulting confusion, is completely inappropriate.
I attended the Libre Office conference in Paris last week. There is a great group of people there doing some great work. They have a slightly different focus than the Apache OpenOffice project has. This is fine, and in many ways healthy. At the conference we had many very constructive discussion about how to cooperate and compliment our respective initiatives. There will be a lot of new technology going into Apache OpenOffice over the next 6 months and we very much encourage the Libre Office community to leverage it as much as possible.
There are some very exciting things going on at Apache OpenOffice. After we get through some rather tedious legal reviews, license and code realignment and remediation etc...Lots of really exciting innovation is planned and the project will continue to deliver new value to the market. We are hopeful that Libre Office, Team OpenOffice (or what ever they end up calling themselves) and anyone else will be able to take advantage of the technology and package it for businesses and consumers alike.
Open Office is alive and well and living at Apache. We are doing some very interesting, exciting and innovative work. All are welcome to join in and help.