SmartEiffel: dead of alive?

In the previous two years it seems that SmartEiffel has "lost steam": frequency of commits seems to confirm this (see also cia.vc stats on SmartEiffel): 3.31 days between each commit compared to the 1.69 hours between messages of ISE Eiffel; quite obviously this metric does not measure the quality of a project but I think it is quite agreeable that it is a good indicator of interestest in the project.

It seems to me that the project leader - Dominique Colnet - has lost interest in his creature. He is free to lose interest; as a professor he may have found other area of Information Technology that looks better from an academic point of view.
The commits from the last few months comes from Cyril Adrian; other contributors

svn log -r {2008-1-1}:HEAD --quiet|grep "^r" | cut -d '|' -f 2 | sort |uniq --count|sort -nr ## tells us
    190  cadrian
    166  colnet
    117  ribet
     25  zen
      5  gremin
      4  pini
      2  dmoisset
      1  jobo

 SmartEiffel was born as an academic project; this allowed for strong theoretical foundations but hindered external contributions.
Sadly its development model has been heavily burderned - at least looking from outside - by the requirements of university which does not easily match the way "logicielle librè" ("programmi liberi" in italian) are usually developed.