It seems like the development of SoftHSM2 has stalled quite a bit. There is still a lot of user interest, but very little action in terms of management of the project. There are many pull requests and issues raised by users, but very little in terms of taking care of those.

SoftHSM was originally developed as a PKCS#11 and HSM test platform for OpenDNSSEC, but later took on a life on itself. The reason for that is that there is a lot of need to use software that talks to Hardware Security Modules, but without actually spending the cash of buying one, mostly for development. But it has also become a cornerstone of a lot of other products, for example IBM Red Hat Identity Management.

NLNet Labs states in the GitHub issue linked: "Given the above, the current state is that development on SoftHSM v2 is dormant and not likely to pick up significantly in the near future. We are conferring as a team on how to proceed in the future, but this will likely take us until at least the summer of 2024."

So the future of SoftHSM does not look very great. Are there any organizations reading this willing to take up this challenge, and make the future of this small "insignificant" open source project great again?