Comment by aidenn0

I think you are reading too much into the term "free software" as GNU was historically[1] no less easier to contribute to than Clojure is today.

The GNU definition of free software (and the 4 freedoms) make it clear that it is about users, but only inasmuch as their private rights to do what they want on their own computers. There is no sense that openly welcoming community patches is something that is involved.

1: It's entirely possible that the community has opened up more recently, but Lucid shipped a fork of Emacs in the 80s for similar reasons to the complaints about clojure today.