[klez]

> I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind.

Free Software sure, that wasn't the point.

Open Source, that was exactly the point. Eric S Raymond, one of the original promoters of the concept of Open Source coined Linus' Law:

    Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow

Which definitely points in the direction of receiving bug reports and patches from users of the application. He was also a proponent of the Bazaar model, where software is developed in public, as opposed to the Cathedral model where software is only released in milestones (he used GCC and Emacs as examples, which reinforces the part of your statement about the Free Software movement in particular).

[pixl97]

ESR is also from a time where spamming countless reports/junk code wasn't really a concept.

They did have things like trolls and zealots that thought "Their one idea" was a gift from god and the maintainers were idiots for not adding it to the application. And eventually those people may have been banned from mailing lists. But in general the people posting code were typically well known and had some interest in fixing the application for some useful purpose.

Simply put, no idealism stands the test of time without change. Nature shows us that everything must evolve or it goes extinct. How 'free software' evolves is now up for debate.

[ambicapter]

Linus’ Law doesn’t really imply anything about maintainers behavior though. As an example, you can imagine maintainers that never update their repos. Every bug fix is a forking of the repo, and people only use the repo with the latest commits. Eventually, the bug count goes down as well!

[solaris2007]

ESR was from a time that was radically different than the the VSCode / brew / macOS / Ubuntu centric era we have today.

  https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe5