Ever since OpenOffice.org became Apache OpenOffice.org, after Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, it has been losing developers. Most of them went to fork, develop LibreOffice out of fear that OpenOffice would become an afterthought for Oracle.
Even though Oracle gave contributed OpenOffice and it's source code to the Apache Software Foundation, after it indeed stop the development of the office suite, developers didn't came back to the project. As a consequence, development of OpenOffice has virtually stopped.
On the other hand, LibreOffice has gained not only many new developers, but also widespread acceptance. Almost every mayor distro ships with it, and even the Italian government joining.
So, learning that there is some serious consideration about shutting down the OpenOffice project all together due to lack of developers comes to the surprise of anyone.
For me, its a bittersweet thing. For one, OpenOffice was the first open source office suite that was really more than good enough for most people to replace MS Office. But, because of the lack of developers and the coming of LibreOffice I simply made the jump to the latter. And the frequent updates, and each one making it progressively better, to LibreOffice I see no point to go back to OpenOffice.
While the is a chance that OpenOffice won't be close, I simply don't see it happening. LibreOffice has taken it's place and I don't developers LibreOffice or Calligra Suite giving any time to OpenOffice. Not to mention that most new developers interested on contributing to a office suite are most likely to pick LibreOffice.
So, the end of an era seems to finally be coming to an end.
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