> It worked decently with thick-skinned, more-or-less autistic men who communicated relatively infrequently over email and had an understanding that they weren't beholden to anybody.

It didn't work well, but it worked, sorta--until it didn't (see: jwz and xemacs).

The difference wasn't the maintainers--the difference was the users. The "users" have gotten exponentially more numerous and steadily less competent. (I have an argument that so have the maintainers, but that's less easily argued while the drop in competence of users is horrifyingly easy to quantify.)

A lot of complaints on the old newsgroups were met with "Send a patch or shut the fuck up". Generally followed by: "Alright, here's your damn patch, asshole. Now fix it."

This moves things along in spite of the general hostility and roughly scales. But it requires that the users are somewhat on the level of the programming capability of the maintainer.

It also doesn't help in the modern world that if you are a maintainer, you are expected to be some infinite well of endless tact instead of being able to tell some dipshit with teenage social skills: "Look, I don't give one ounce of flying fuck about you and your opinion and you can fuck right off to whatever primordial ooze you just crawled out from. You are killfiled." Then you get the Twitterverse whining at you even if you aren't on Twitter.

AOL created "Eternal September."

Twitter managed to one down that and created "Eternal High School."

So, who's got dibs on "Eternal Middle School"? Twitch, maybe?

In general, while I happily released stuff as open source in the past, I wouldn't dream of releasing anything now even if you put me under duress. If I release something as open source now, I have to perceive the benefit to ME as being very high.