Comment by dfox
7 years ago
Most high profile project that explicitly claim to be free software in fact do not do any kind of community management at all and do not tend to actively seek outside code contributions.
In fact the community involvement in development as exemplified by GitHub (and SourceForge before that) is to a large extent invention of the same group that started using the term open source (for what is otherwise mostly the same thing as free software).
The software that allows the GitHub style (light-forking) environment is called git, created by Linus. He's a great example of a person who doesn't care about free software ideologies, but cares about open sourcing code a lot.
And still, both his main projects (Linux and git) are under the most “ideological” license, the GPL. And the troubles he’s gone to, in order to keep this state of things in the face of commercial pressures on Linux, are almost biblical.
Linus cares a great deal, he just doesn’t want to be cornered as an FSF zealot.