I can assure you that is not the case. :) We have a very active & growing team focused on the project, and we're all quite excited about it. If you're interested in contributing, please jump in or reach out!
I wonder why companies even bother open sourcing their software with all the critics looking for angle's to their motivation. Better to keep it private and not put up with the arm chair open source critics.
The cynic in me thinks it's often a case of a product line they no longer want to support but for which an established user base already exists (Flex comes to mind). The optimist in me thinks this isn't necessarily a bad thing though, it's certainly better than just killing it altogether. The FOSS idealist in me thinks it's great to be getting all this stuff, under an Apache licence!
Certainly, if criticism is a problem, then doing something in the open with the community is probably not going to end well.
So they must never be criticized?
They are also late to the party. Google etc released theirs first.
Google are also late to the party. Theano, Torch, etc released theirs first.