Large open source projects are often created by, and receive the bulk of their contributions from, tech company offices where real-time face-to-face communication is happening behind the scenes. Just last week, a few people on my team in San Francisco working on something related to a Google open source project drove down to Mountian View for lunch to discuss it with the authors.
When you don’t have that luxury, it takes so much longer to get patches upstreamed precisely because the design controversies have to be hammered out in asynchronous text. Even then, it’s often down to a benevolent dictator for the project or the topic area to approve or deny, there’s nothing like the genuine collaboration of two employees in the same building working towards consensus.
Even for Google — when I was on the Chrome team a few years ago (to pick a nice open example, in case anyone wants to stalk my commit history) my most important collaborators were three and twelve time zones away.
What many projects don't discover until too late is that the practices that let you work effectively across ∆x are the same ones you need to work effectively across ∆t, and no airline can fly the new hires to last year's face-to-face.
When you don’t have that luxury, it takes so much longer to get patches upstreamed precisely because the design controversies have to be hammered out in asynchronous text. Even then, it’s often down to a benevolent dictator for the project or the topic area to approve or deny, there’s nothing like the genuine collaboration of two employees in the same building working towards consensus.