But for the product discussed here it is. (They actually hired some of the Vyatta devs to work on it, since the upstream project seems to be left to die at Brocade)
since the upstream project seems to be left to die at Brocade
Indeed, Brocade closed sourced the main product in 2012 and left the community edition to die.
Thankfully the Vyatta core was forked in 2013 (renamed VyOS) and is under active development as a free open source project. [1]