Hmmm... I think this is a reasonable example - which shows many aspects of where this thread could go, and I get an advantage as the pmdevil who was involved ;-)
First off, it's incredibly trivial to become a pmdev member. Really. You make it sound difficult - it isn't. It does take some willpower to justify to oneself that you'll do something with it, but it doesn't seem, from looking at the list, that actually producing a patch is a requirement. I'm betting the promise to produce a patch isn't strictly required either.
What this means is that the source code to PM is already nearly open source - you pretty much just have to ask to gain access. What is unfortunate is that you can't just grab a tarball of the whole thing and play with that, but even the GPL doesn't really say how an interested party may receive the source code, only that interested parties must be able to do so. Signing up for pmdev merely says you're interested. (I'm not saying that PM is GPL'd, either, so they are allowed to say no.)
The real issues are, based on my limited experience, and a number of /msg's I've received:
- A desire to do something. Generally speaking, people fix their own itches. In the commercial world, this means that eating and a roof over one's head is an itch, for which one sells their programming expertise to solve someone else's itch. In the volunteer world, this means that they solve the problems that affect themselves first. Thus, if it itches you, you're the most likely person to scratch it.
- An ability to do something. Even once you write the patch(es), you need to convince someone that it's a good, useful patch. There is generally one person who will point out holes, whether that's coding, style, or usability, and block significant numbers of patches from people he doesn't know/trust. (If this is not the case, he's masking it very well, in my experience. As well as a number of others whose names/aliases I won't reveal.)
The bottom line to me, having overcome the first hurdle, is that certain
gods have a very tight hand in keeping changes from going in. At least, that's the perception others will get from dealing with him. I'm actually 100% positive that he believes he's keeping the chaos from grabbing hold of PM, leaving us with an ever-changing (the definition of instability) web site that will drive people away. At least on his usability comments. On his technical comments (code, style), I firmly believe that he knows more of the code than most other pmdevils, thus he probably is right about those anyway. (Although I'll continue to disagree about "unless is confusing".)
So, on one hand, there are too few pmdevils submitting patches, yet on the other, there is a subconscious effort to stymy patches by anyone other than a select few (who generally can apply their own patches). It's the latter which demoralises the former, and it ends up in a violent circle which I cannot offer advice on how to fix.
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