I don't know about this project, but unmaintained copyright years has been the case in almost every project that I've taken the time to look at (and that has them). Unless a project has an active legal team, I wouldn't use such dates to mean anything (for better or worse).
The project is developed by Galois. From their website[1], "Galois is a privately held U.S.-owned and -operated company established in 1999 in Portland, Oregon."
So they started at probably one of the worst times to start a tech company (right at the dot-com bust) and are still around.
That says nothing about whether Ivory will get any traction, but at least there's an apparently stable company behind it.
Indeed. Galois have a reputation, at least in the Haskell community, for designing, building and releasing really cool stuff -- but then not maintaining it for much longer than the internal project requires. Galois is primarily a consulting firm and the amount of time they have for projects depends greatly on how useful they are to their current consulting arrangements. That said, I don't speak for them in any capacity -- these are only my personal observations.
