[drivingmenuts]

> Now opensource will become a thing that only "influential" people can contribute to. We're back to nepotism, not meritocracy. Down hill we go.

Or people can just start their own projects instead of working on someone else's. Many projects instead of potential large points of failure.

[siwatanejo]

I don't know about you, but as for me, when I contribute to opensource it's because I find some improvement that makes the project better because it probably polishes some rough edge around a kind-of particular use case (that maybe few people face, but still, it makes the project better for them; it amplifies the range of usecases that it can span to). If everybody does the same with their small improvements, the project becomes better for everyone, but none of the contributors of these small changes would have time to embark on maintaining a fork. Mantaining a fork is hard work, not only because software breaks over time (dependencies going obsolete or insecure, builds stop working because of old toolkits), but also because not pulling the latest changes from master would mean that your fork gets stagnated (and thus not worth to run it).