Voting seems unattractive to me. If I trusted somebody and had enough respect for their work to give them commit access to a repo of mine, then I'd also trust t

Voting seems unattractive to me. If I trusted somebody and had enough respect for their work to give them commit access to a repo of mine, then I'd also trust them to merge whatever 3rd party patches they wanted. No point in tying things up with a slow layer of democracy. I can imagine having problems getting people to bother to vote at all on work they have no interest in. Actually I don't have my own repos these days, but it's irritating to me how large the barriers to contribution really are in the free software world. We have complicated software, often more complicated that it should be, written in all kinds of different languages and frameworks, to the point that just finding the latest sources, getting the dependencies, figuring out how to build it is hard enough, then also understanding it well enough to make your changes, and then also dealing with the idiosyncrasies of whatever person or group is maintaining the thing, to actually get a patch accepted. It's not easy even for a decent programmer.