None of these things are true, I don't know where anyone comes up with this stuff. Sounds like a smear job more than anything. CakePHP2 is PHP 5.2.8+[1]. It's still being maintained and 2.2 was released this week[2]. Lithium is not a real 'fork' from Cake - rather it is a project that two of the Cake devs were working on as a 'next gen CakePHP' but decided to make into a separate project - the two frameworks don't share any code in their 'production' releases. Lithium has a much smaller community and is still poorly documented (as far as I can tell having tried to use it for a project).

[1] http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/appendices/2-0-migration-guid...

[2] http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/lorenzo/2012/07/01/cakeph...