"Homesteading the Noosphere" problems on Zebra

Hi there!

Zebra is an important (read: used a lot in production and supported by a very 
active community of user) GPL project providing routing services (RIP, OSPF, 
BGP).

For more than a year, though, its community is vocally disgruntled by the 
unfortunate unresponsivness of its otherwise excellent founder / leader / 
maintainer, Kunihiro Ishiguro.

The main rant goes like this: Kunihiro spent most of its time on the 
commercial version of the project (ZebOS), the GPL version evolves very 
slowly, much user fear that version 1.0 will never see the light. What seems 
actually worse: Kunihiro does not seem to be able to follow the (not very 
rapid, (its nothing like lk)) pace of its community of users, drops most 
patches, and worst than worst never reply to the maintainership concerns of 
its community (which seems to be the worse crime a FreeSoftware project 
maintainer can be accused of by its peers).

Almost all members of the community being concerned, they started a co-project
(http://zebra.dishone.st/) which _is_ actually responsive. They take great 
caution to make sure the tree is always in sink with whatever new release 
Kunihiro manage to put out, because everybody has a lot of respect for what 
he gave the community.

This bring an interesting twist to ESR "Homesteading the Noosphere": 
What if the maintainer once did a great job, then is not up to par with what 
its community expects, but instead of giving away control or refusing to do 
so, just remains silent on the subject and acts as if the problem does not 
exist ?

Why is Kunihiro so silent ?  The users ask him many times to accept a more 
active co-maintainer, he never answered. (I wonder if he would be able to 
answer lwn question on this subject). Kunihiro Ishiguro attitude could not be 
better illustrated than by reading each entries of this thread:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=104552814700001&r=1&w=2

Zebra's community seems to be torn between its respect to what Kunihiro 
already achieved and the necessity to go forward.

And it raises interesting question as to competition in the Noosphere: 
Does a new project like http://www.xorp.org/ that is very behind zebra but a 
lot more active is always a better long term bet than a much more advanced   
but very slow one ? Could we leverage this Noosphere threat to convince 
Kunihiro to open up its play ? Couldn't we not just port what is good from 
Zebra in Xorp ?

FD