There is no guarantee that someone with commit access will review, or even acknowledge, a developer’s pull request, which can lead to governance disputes. A company, for example, might release open source code but rely primarily on its own employees to maintain it. Although the project is open source in the sense that anybody can use, inspect, fork, and modify the code, it might be difficult to make substantial contributions as a non-employee. Anybody can submit a change, but that doesn’t mean it will be approved.
