What's next for Apache OpenOffice

> I may plan or discuss my funeral (or final wishes), but that does not mean I am dead or dying. :-)
Sure, but it doesn't mean you're not dying either. And AOO clearly is dying, the numbers are unambiguous. Fyi, I am not and never was affiliated to LO or AOO in any way other than as an occasional user.

> Because of this "publicity", the AOO has been overwhelmed by lots and lots of offers of support, which have been graciously and thankfully accepted.
How many lines of code (or translation, artwork etc.) were committed as a result?

> But certainly there is room for other players in this game, and certainly room for one (or more) that are under a permissive license. The thing is is that they don't have to be clones; they can have different audiences, different "missions" so-to-speak.
So what is AOO's mission compared to LO's? I'll quote myself from here: https://lwn.net/Comments/699409/
In order to justify the existence of a fork with that sort of argument you show some feature that
- cannot be implemented in LibreOffice because of technical reasons, or the direction the project is meant to take, or maintainability concerns etc.
- can be implemented in AOO in principle as the reason doesn't apply there
- can be implemented in practice, i. e. there's somebody willing to do the work
Sometimes that is the case, see for instance the fork of DragonFlyBSD from FreeBSD. But for AOO I haven't seen any such reason.

IOW, perhaps AOO *could* have some sort of mission that is distinct from LO's, but I don't see it, and you haven't presented one. If permissive licensing was one, then hordes of ASL2 fans should rush towards OpenOffice right now and commit tons of useful code. But they don't, meaning that apparently they care more about the technical improvements (build system, code cleanup etc.) that LO made. And I don't see any reason for that to change.

> they see how important AOO still is to numerous people
I suppose that depends on your definition of “numerous”. It certainly doesn't have a meaningful amount of developer mindshare, and while it might be important to some users, that is most likely because they know the brand and haven't realised yet that all meaningful development is done in LO.

Anyway, I honestly hope that you'll be able to stop deluding yourself soon. It's dead, Jim.