This started as a fork of the HTML5_base theme with certain patches or suggestions from the HTML5 base issue queue applied. But has become a 'starter' theme, the idea being to: git clone fivealive, remove the remote repo and then modify away.
In other words instead of it being a base theme, and overriding certain parts of it in a sub theme. We just modify the base theme.
In the same vein it has a commented link to normalize.css instead of a css reset.