I worked on a company sponsored open source project for a couple of years. We were a small team from different departments who kept it going as both a labor of

I worked on a company sponsored open source project for a couple of years. We were a small team from different departments who kept it going as both a labor of love and because we used it for customer projects. I could make necessary changes for a customer, fork it, generalize it and then after discussions with the rest of the team, I could get my changes merged after the team came to a consensus. It was a relatively painless process. We could release any time we wanted to. Then as the project became more popular, 5 years into its life (about a year after I got involved), it became more official and transferred to another team. Then any change had to go through “the process” and any proposed change had to go through levels of approval. I still had commit rights and they didn’t take away my access. I found myself in the same position as the Haskell developers. Either I had to hard fork the code and have a customer specific implementation or go through “the process”. It wasn’t a fun skunkworks project anymore. Luckily, one of my last changes before the project got transitioned to another team was an officially supported extension framework where I could customize functionality without changing the base code - much like the VSCode example.