It depends. If you are the main author of a large project, and you look forward to extend it by taking contributions in a direction that carries any meaning to

It depends. If you are the main author of a large project, and you look forward to extend it by taking contributions in a direction that carries any meaning to you, integrating code at random won't magically result in a better project. As the author an maintainer of several small FOSS projects, I rarely receive pull requests that I can merge right away. In that sense, a distributed VCS doesn't really improve over the patch-by-mail approach for random contributions (it does helps cooperation among regulars however). I can also tell you right away that a FOSS project without direction or maintainer quickly dies, independently of the VCS. Successfull forks are very rare. Mostly, projects with good potential but no maintainer get simply dumped and reimplemented by another programmer. If you are a maintainer, you will appreciate all the points the authors is making. If you are making a contribution, adhering to all the points will increase the odds of your change to make it quickly and improve the software. Also, conversely as a contributor, I don't spend time on projects which have no maintainer or lack direction anymore. Having the source of a project (especially large) sounds useful at first, until you realize that maintaining it without the inner knowledge is a daunting task. It only makes sense if you are willing to use it extensively (and become the new the-facto maintainer).