Back when I worked on GWT, we had trouble accepting outside contributions because the team had a mandate to support Googlers. That is, much like other libraries and tools at Google, changes could not break google3. This means
testing patches against google3 and either changing the patch, or fixing whatever code used it, and these are tasks that no outsider can do.
Shepherding these patches is no fun when you have your own changes to work on that are more important to the team.
We did something similar, by creating an external fork where changes could be tried out by the community, without necessarily being accepted into the internal version.
I think a fork could work if there was enough external momentum, but even 20 people working full time would actually be pretty good for an open source project. How many developers will this fork attract? The fork would need to attract other businesses who can put people on it.
One downside is that the code isn't tested against google3. Sometimes you find actual bugs that way.
Edit: reading more closely, the complaint doesn't seem to be that patches weren't reviewed, but rather that bug reports weren't investigated. That's definitely something outside developers could do more of, and seems a lot easier than forking?
Shepherding these patches is no fun when you have your own changes to work on that are more important to the team.
We did something similar, by creating an external fork where changes could be tried out by the community, without necessarily being accepted into the internal version.
I think a fork could work if there was enough external momentum, but even 20 people working full time would actually be pretty good for an open source project. How many developers will this fork attract? The fork would need to attract other businesses who can put people on it.
One downside is that the code isn't tested against google3. Sometimes you find actual bugs that way.
Edit: reading more closely, the complaint doesn't seem to be that patches weren't reviewed, but rather that bug reports weren't investigated. That's definitely something outside developers could do more of, and seems a lot easier than forking?