At the time ESR wrote the essay, both Emacs and GCC did use the Cathedral development model I speak of. They've only opened up since due to forks like XEmacs a

At the time ESR wrote the essay, both Emacs and GCC did use the Cathedral development model I speak of. They've only opened up since due to forks like XEmacs and EGCS which started to eat GNU's lunch. The FSF eventually had to cave in to the Bazaar model because it works. Furthermore, people without committer access land patches in the BSD's all the time. In fact, that's how you get committer access: you first start contributing patches to the appropriate mailing list where existing committers can review them, discuss them, and perhaps merge them. It's not terribly different from sending a pull request on GitHub, and afaik it's pretty much the same process used by the Linux kernel.