zaitcev: I know you’re not entirely serious, but I don’t know why Ted’s post has put the dampers on anything. Fact is, it’s still open source, you can still fix things, and you can still get them into the main codebase. Or fork. Even better, you’ve been through SMI code review, so you’d be super familiar :)
Ted’s post is wrong in many ways of course. It didn’t take 3 years to get a distributed SCM for the sources out there. I don’t believe for an instant he’s stupid enough to think that getting external committers set up is as simple as “setting up a Mercurial server” (I can assume you remember Teamware). The low rate of contributions is not primarily a result of the cumbersome request sponsor process.
You can’t call something astroturfing when it’s actually doing useful work, just because that rate is fairly low. Especially when you look at how DTrace and ZFS have been ported everywhere (except Linux).
(Update: I would have preferred to reply as a comment, but you have anonymous comments disabled, and LiveJournal is still broken when it comes to openid. I didn’t use my work blog as that’s for content not chit-chat.)