Google wouldn't just take patches from any Joe Schmoe, and it certainly wouldn't be a huge overhead to deal with them. It would be similar to how a project lik

Google wouldn't just take patches from any Joe Schmoe, and it certainly wouldn't be a huge overhead to deal with them. It would be similar to how a project like Rails takes community patches: people wanting to contribute strike up conversation in a bug tracking program or IRC with some core developers. They say "hey I wrote this cool patch that fixes this ticket". The core team member takes 20 minutes to check out the patch, and he merges it in to his branch and then commits it to the core repo. After this community member does this a few times, the core member begins to trust and understand their coding style, and gives them commit access. Doesn't take a ton of resources, and it encourages an open and vibrant community. The benefits of doing this "up front work" in vetting a new committer is, well, you get a new committer knocking off tickets.