[BioRuby] Are the Bio* projects dying?

[Pjotr Prins]

When I check the # of commits to BioRuby, BioPerl, BioPython, I notice
the projects are not very active (to put it mildly). With BioRuby the
# of downloads is still increasing - remember we hit 10K not that long
ago, now we are at 35K. See http://biogems.info/

With Ruby/Biogems there is health, coming from some 10 regular
committers. Ruby in Bioinformatics, going by downloads and citations,
appears to be as healthy as ever. JRuby on the JVM may turn out to be
a blessing for Ruby - especially if we can make our gems easily
accessible to other JVM languages.

But, what does this really mean for the Bio* projects as a whole? What
happened to new blood? What should we do? 

Maybe it is merely my sense of disorientation and confusion in the
face of an (apparently) meaningless and absurd world.  

Pj.