Why is Salix dormant?

(Sigh…) It isn’t.

Distrowatch has the following policy:

A distribution which has not put out a new release in two or more years is marked as being Dormant in our database. The distribution may still be worked on, but has not published any new stable releases. When a dormant distribution publishes a new stable release it is then marked as being Active. A project may also be marked as dormant if it no longer plans to put out future releases, ie planned inactivity, while older releases are maintained.

Salix is based on Slackware and usually new Salix releases happen only when there is a new Slackware release. The time between Slackware releases is usually greater than two years, so the time between Salix releases is usually greater than two years. Unavoidably, Distrowatch then marks Salix as “dormant”, which means nothing about the actual state of Salix. It is only a result of the above mentioned Distrowatch policy.

But why isn’t Slackware also marked as dormant then?

That is something that you will have to ask Distrowatch about.