I would also like to see the maven drivers sent as an OSGI bundle as well. This would make deployment in OSGI easier, and doesn't take much more to accomplish.
In my view the driver has already been forked by Kevin Wooten so it's more of a case of will it be an official fork or not? I think it would be a good idea to harness the enthusiasm from the contributors to the newer driver. However I think it would be a shame and a mistake to throw away the work that has gone into the stable driver. If it's not feasible to merge the code of both drivers I do think it would be useful to share what can be - particularly the functional tests.
If it is decided to promote both drivers as official projects I think, for the benefit of the users confused about the choice, that the newer driver be labelled as a beta until such time as everyone is convinced in its stability and functionality, that it is pushed as the current driver and then the older one can become legacy.
My interest in the project has mainly been around getting the jars automatically uploaded to Maven. I'm interested in reviewing driver patches but I don't have the knowledge of the protocol at the moment to provide any useful feedback other than obvious things. I would like to experiment with an alternative build system called Gradle and get continuous integration and deployment sorted out so that upon check-in the driver is built on a variety of platforms, tested on a variety of servers and automatically deployed to Maven central as well as the website. My time is a bit variable with kids/work/life taking a big chunk of it so I would like to collaborate with people on the project.