It would have been great to see these improvements contributed back to PhoneGap/Cordova, which has an extremely permissive license and whose code is open-source. As it is, trigger.io comes with a restrictive license, I have to create an account to use it, I can't see the code, and they mandate that I include their branding with any free use of their product. Yay.
Is trigger.io a fork of PhoneGap? If not, "contributed back" isn't exactly the right phrase.
In any case, I think that anyone is free to do whatever they want with their code- trigger.io are not obliged to liberally license their work. They even describe how they've achieved their performance increase in the blog post- it's more than many would do.
We're trying to optimize the development cycle for web devs. So it's not just about the bridge itself, but also keeping the code around it lean and fit in with our command line tools / cloud build service. All so the build / test cycle is seconds.
Also we're a small team so don't have time to do everything we would like, and also contribute to Cordova. Trigger.io's native bridge is not a a fork of PhoneGap or downstream of it.