2. What has the author done to engage so far? Has Apache responded to their emails? Have they opened any threads in chat forums?
3. Honestly, just who cares? So what if OpenOffice is just being minimally kept alive?
The post is about the fact that it is _deceptively_ minimally kept alive.
A significant part of the decision process involving OSS choice is measuring active maintenance. Surely, these commits exist to give a false impression here, which down the road can harm those using unmaintained software.
Edit: before I'm accused of not reading the article, I did, but I did not look at the actual OpenOffice download page. The current release, dated April 2023, includes the following, which seems substantially more than "whitespace cleanup" as TFA author claims, but seems quite in line with software that is being maintained but not actively developed:
Other Improvements/Enhancements
Writer: Dialog "Frame" in Writer / automatic size / changing shortcut keys (German)
Calc: Protect Table – Dialog too narrow for German heading string
Base: Dialog text in "Datenbank austauschen" (exchange database) dialog is cut (German)
Calc: Use the existing icon for "Remove Filter" in toolbar and menu
Calc: Text in cell comments is more readable
Calc: Added support for Excel 2010s DateTime type cells.
Calc: Rich text cells imported from XLSX files have their contents duplicated
Several fixes for importing OOXML documents
All applications: Import fails when the Relationship "Target" attribute in _rels/.rels has superfluous slashes
Calc: XLSX with omitted cell references opens with empty cells
Calc: no text imported from XSLX when xl/sharedStrings.xml has wrong case
Several fixes for importing MS Excel 2003 SpreadsheetML files
Calc: ss:DateTime cell value is loaded as either only a date or a time
Calc: fractional seconds are silently ignored during import
Calc: cell with ss:MergeAcross="0" gets an extra empty cell to the right
Calc: import corrupts references to columns that are multiples of 26 (eg. Z)
Writer: Importing apostrophes from HTML fails
Calc: Cut-and-paste between spreadsheets causes incorrect cell reference changes
Writer: Awkward Chinese (ZH-TW) numbering suffix when importing RTF document
Calc: Last CSV line is silently lost on import if last field is quoted and end-of-file is reached before closing quoteThe pretense that this project is alive and not a zombie puts millions of users in danger who are downloading insecure trash under the impression that this is a live project that's the OpenOffice they've heard so much about.
They haven't been relevant for years.
So name the projects being used and not the dollars flowing to ASF. Also this is completely orthogonal to the fact that they keep OpenOffice "alive" strictly selfishly for their own benefit and to the detriment of LibreOffice.
Apache HTTPd accounts for nearly a third of the webservers in use on the internet today.
Apache Arrow underpins a swathe of datascience tooling, as does Apache Parquet.
Then there's Apache Kafka, and Apache Hadoop, naturally.
Apache Maven is still the predominant tool for doing Java compilation, and in the Java space lets not forget such things as Log4J, where we saw absolute chaos a couple of years ago caused by those vulnerabilities in it. Most of the cloud services you interact with, especially at Amazon, are written in Java.
The list of crucial projects leveraged by the wider industry goes on and on and on.
Yes, Apache seems to end up as a dumping ground for an awful lot of open source projects, but that's not all it is.