[pufuwozu]

I think everyone agrees that accepting patches would be awesome. The F# team isn't very big and is largely made up of researchers. They have obviously thought about an open model but decided not to, for some reason or other.

Whether they have a valid reason or not, it's perfectly legitimate to create a public fork of F# and accept patches - I imagine that Microsoft will practically beg to merge in quality patches once they're proven to be popular.