Comment by pessimizer

Of course they're a stakeholder. They've made an investment of time and effort, and they're hoping that it will pay off. The question is whether a maintainer will respect that.

If you want to maintain sole ownership of something that >800 people contributed to, that reflects on you. People will judge you. Most maintainers would feel obligated to concede some control. But LLMs have intentionally aimed to devalue programming, so this transition is totally consistent with the new ownership. And it may be wildly successful, because they've got an unlimited supply of tokens for the foreseeable future.

But I'd say the opposite: Most maintainers would feel blessed to have a lot of contributors so invested that they felt a need to have a say in the direction of the project.