The Linux Foundation picks up FRRouting

1. The people who present themselves as "NetDEF"[1] having tried to "monetise" Quagga, when - partly by accident (I was away for 4 or 5 years doing academic stuff), partly by design - they controlled the one active maintainer, by seeking "sponsorship" to help with maintenance. Of course, no sponsorship, and your patches might just - completely accidentally - just not get looked at.

We can see this pattern just from the commit statistics.

When NetDEF lost their maintainers, because of these games (one was suspended for unilaterally removing another non-NetDEF maintainer, and for other unacceptable behaviour, asked to explain and just left; the other - myself - left soon after due to these things), NetDEF suddenly started agitating behind the scenes for a fork. The continuing maintainers tried to reconcile with them and their suspended/left maintainer (who never answered the suspension charges).

However, they continued to agitate - they had lost their business model. When this FRR fork was floated they wanted some kind of bronze/silver/gold sponsorship model. I guess this is how they get it.

2. Along came Cumulus. Cumulus are a startup. They don't really have time for others to question their patches. Plus, they know everything - who _are_ others to question their patches, really? Also, they came along right when NetDEF had control. At some stage I guess Cumulus did not sponsor NetDEF and, completely co-incidentally, Cumulus' patches started to pile-up (just look at the commit stats).

Now, at some point - I don't know exactly when - Cumulus did start sponsoring NetDEF. Unfortunately, this was possibly just after NetDEF lost their maintainers. Which I guess was a bit annoying to Cumulus. By this stage, Cumulus patches were going in at a rate like never before, and the ones not going in were being reviewed and comments sent to them.

However, see above - Cumulus don't like dealing with patch reviews. They would just resubmit a patch train, with the same patches with queries outstanding, included - effectively just ignored review - over and over again. Rather than have the developers of the changes manage the upstreaming of their own patches, they gated that work through one person. They seem to have been using some SCM internally with a major impedance mismatch to git (our upstream git anyway). The "Author" field on resubmitted patches would change from patch train to patch train. They submitted 3rd parties patches with the author field set to themselves (we've had immense grief from 3rd parties over Author field in the past, so I'm sensitive to that now).

Cumulus and NetDEF then decided to rewrite the constitutional document of Quagga. Mostly it was was high-level, unobjectionable stuff, except all decisions to be made by Google Hangouts meetings, by majority vote, and to be final.

They refused to discuss or negotiate on any of this. Votes were by company effectively (shows the thinking) and companies that had _never_ contributed to company just _happened_ to pop-up on the conference call where Cumulus asked people to vote on this. A board member of NetDEF works for the company that just magically appeared on that call.

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Essentially, the cause of the split is that corporates wanted control of Quagga.

Corporates who I don't believe have much feel for free software communities.

Good luck to them.

1. Or whatever entities they actually work for. They are extremely opaque about things. Only 1 of their people seems to work for NetDEF. I am fairly sure there is another corporate involved.