I quite agree with this comment from Reddit:

"I think you nailed it that this is most likely more bureaucracy than malice.

IBM is like government. There's no sense of urgency whatsoever."

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/41dadv/is_expre...

This actually happened well before IBM acquired StrongLoop - I first noticed it in February, but it was added in January 2015. The IBM acquisition was announced in September 2015.

In their usual fashion they link to internal bug trackers when committing (without summary), something that has frustrated me greatly while attempting to work with them on strong-remoting and loopback-explorer.

Did you read the GitHub thread on Express? The project is still very much alive, but its internals have been broken out into standalone packages, so the only commits to Express itself are version updates. That issue was created based on a misunderstanding.

If you read further down on the Github thread, the guy who did the splitting out is no longer working on the project and it's now fully in IBM's hands, who aren't doing much of anything.

I just saw that! I read it a few days ago, but went back to catch up. I came back to edit my comment.

This appears not to be the case, so it's me who's saying things based on misunderstandings now.