The rise of few-maintainer projects
That two experienced developers could hold such conflicting views on commit access belies a quiet but growing tension between past and present norms in open source. The salient issue for maintainers today is less about growing contributor numbers and more about navigating the flow of developers who are clamoring for their time. In a world where single maintainers like Dominic Tarr maintain hundreds of tiny modules, we need to reframe the question from “Why would he do that?” to “How do we design for trustless interactions?”