That was an awkard conclusion on "Active Development". The total number of issues and pull requests on LESS dwarfs that of SASS, so a larger number of open/pending ones is natural. Some more numbers:
Simply looking at commits/month doesn't tell us anything. Want to compare size of commits? Lines affected? Comments vs code? Code vs tests? I think the general picture is much more favorable for LESS. If anything, there's a hundred people ready to pick up development at any time.
> a hundred people ready to pick up development at any time.
I really wish that was true. From my experience, almost every time I jump to the forks sections of libraries I'm using (or interested in using) I'm disappointed when I see that 99% of thos forks contribute nothing. Forking by definition was a serious move, now (on github/bitbucket) it's not - most of the time it's just one-click copying the project to your own collection and it's just noise when I'm really looking for an alternative fork. Just my 2 cents why I'm not impressed by numbers of forks as a project sustainability measure, it's not an opinion on less/sass specifically.
I've seen this argument a few times. Forking on github is just the fastest way to try something out with the codebase and/or make a pull request. That was happening before, in a smaller scale, you just couldn't see it. I think the number of forks directly reflects the size of the community and traction.
I agree that it's hard to find real forks, watchers are a good indicator but you can't search/filter by that. On the other hand, meaningful forks tend to change their name the moment they detach from the original.
You certainly have a point, I just too often came across projects updated 1 year ago or earlier with 50 forks and any further support in there. Maybe code hosting providers could by default hide from the project page the ones that haven't contributed anything (I know they won't do it, they like the big numbers).
At JSConf Alexis was wishing someone would take over project maintenance and free him up entirely for LESS project direction & language design. The relative commits are quite relevant.
