Ara (via Ted) talks about the failures that have been made in XDoclet's community management. Or at least the failures as he perceives them. Some of what he says resonates with my experience in Ant, some doesn't.
First he talks about letting people (committers in this case) in too quickly as they'd be leaving behind a bunch of unmaintained code.
What I've learned is that you shouldn't let people in a popular project that easily. Someone comes, contributes something and goes, and there's no one to maintain it, and the guy apparently is happy to see his name among the team members list.
Like XDoclet, Ant has accepted each and every contribution for a while and simply faces the exact same problems of unmaintained and unmaintainable (unless you have an installation of application server X or SCM tool Y around) code.
Unlike XDoclet, we haven't made those contributors committers automatically. So no, Ara, it is the code you and we have let in that's causing the problems, not the people. Still I agree with Ara. You have to be sure that people are going to persist when you make them committers.
But let's face it, people move on - maybe after years - or lose access to server X. Even if you pick your committers very carefully, you may end up with unmaintained code over time. Unless you have a team that lives collective code ownership where a reasonably large part of your code base is more than just a one-man-show.
In "meritocratic" development communities like Apache's one-man-shows tend to happen less often from my experience. Like I said, Ant has its unmaintained areas, but every now and then a new contributor steps up from the larger user base and starts to fix things. Those new contributors have to get their code reviewed by an existing committer, you build up a trust relation and at the same time make at least two people closely familiar with a certain part of the code.
It is not enough to choose your committers carefully.
Ara's conclusion is
So accept a piece of code only if the contributor remain the proud owner of it.and with this I couldn't agree less. Accept it only if the community is willing and able to take ownership of it.