+1 button could work as voting system to reduce that maintenance burden too. Semi-democratic method can be introduced to merge most voted and looks good to MS.
My words were not clear, I meant and edited to "semi-democratic" way. The voting is one indicator but I also believe strong vision and strategy of leader is the key to success.
And my point was not +1 button but splitting code into open source "Client side + Test-backend" and closed sourced "Production-backend". Backend can be composed of some interface and multiple implementation such as test impl and prod impl. Actually Github could be hosted in Azure and I do not care their backend as I go github.com anyway.