The Apache Software Foundation offers a suite of office productivity software named Apache Open Office. Based on the download page, you would never guess the last major release of the software was made available in 2014.
With that bit of release history in mind, would it be fair to consider Apache Open Office as an un-maintained project? In this blog post, I share a quick recap of the history behind Apache Open Office, and my opinion on why The Apache Software Foundation’s actions may be masking the answer to this question.
But why care? Open source work is volunteer work. I'm not saying it is above criticism, but if truly the only people willing and wanting to work on the project want to make the commits like that as opposed to a single one, who cares? If you strongly believe in topics like this and want to work on the project then go help them out. But like I said, if the only people who actually want to work on the project want to work on it like that, then who cares?
Does Apache have incentive for the project to seem alive when it isn't? Maybe? I don't know. Do I think they're trying to make it look alive? I feel pretty strongly they aren't.
It’s one thing to have a bunch of repos up that a couple of people are pushing around here and there. It’s a totally different thing for a major open source presence to prop up a project instead of retiring it. This isn’t some random project; it’s run by a major org, doesn’t have good contribution flows, and has been struggling since 2013.
There was a security fix in February of 2023. I don't think no releases for six months warrants going there.