[cangeroo]

Yes, in theory.

In practice, however, the source code can be overwhelmingly large or complex, e.g. Chromium.

And yes, even if you're blocked from contributing to the project, you could 'just' fork it. But it would be incredibly hard to maintain a fork, and to get users to use/support it.

It is therefore important to distinguish between community-owned projects (e.g. Linux Foundation) that aim to be inclusive, and those that are privately-owned, and can easily have political behaviors (e.g. intentionally ignoring contributions, e.g. VSCode, because it goes against your interests, e.g. .NET, Copilot, etc.).