The Linux Foundation picks up FRRouting

I was mostly away then. I was busy with academic stuff from about '09 to late '14. During that period some others did most of the maintenance. The period you mention I think the primary maintainer wasn't being paid, he was over-worked, and he unfortunately didn't try to involve others (which may have been down to there not really being others to help with maintenance).

From about '12 on to late '14 someone else was primary maintainer. They were paid, through an ISC project initially, called "OpenSourceRouting". ISC had some internal issues, which led to them refocusing on core stuff. That maintainer and another ISCer, with some others, setup a non-profit tax-exempt corporate - "NetDEF" - to take over that ISC routing project in late '13.

Unfortunately, they chose to take a strategy of using control over commit access to 'encourage' corporate sponsors to sponsor them. They were also less than open to others about the fact they had some kind of commercial contracting business on the side - and the public record (the email list) is clear that they would try push such work into Quagga, even while there was a backlog of regular contributions.

I was finishing up my academic stuff in '14-'15, and contracted with them from late Sept. '14 to begin May '15. I left them because of differences on the above. From about Sept. '15 onward patch integration greatly increased. The backlog of patches was dealt with by about summer '16. Patches, whether submitted by email or bugzilla, are dealt with promptly - either integrated or returned with queries or comments.

When NetDEF lost their maintainers, they - as per other long comment - agitated for a fork behind the scenes, since about May '15. Assisted by Cumulus, who have their own agenda. They've got their fork. Now they're spreading somewhat alternative facts about what happened.

The facts are there though, in the commit history and the email lists.