Regarding their origins and updates. Does one person come up with an idea that they think would benefit the program, and a community decides if it’s really a good update?
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Anyone can do anything.
That’s the whole point.
I throw my code out there, I don’t really care what happens to it. Maybe someone picks it up, changes it, creates a nice project, website, takes patches from others like myself, co-ordinates it, turns it into a whole new thing.
Or maybe I do that, and control what happens in my own project. But I still can’t “stop” people taking my code and going elsewhere.
It’s a community in the larger sense, with a shared resource that we’re all happy to give away to others. My code has ended up on multiple platforms, in multiple spin-offs, it was started from code that someone else wrote but who didn’t have any interest in a thing I wanted to do with it. I did it just for fun, and also to have an end result that I wanted. Others took my code and did the same for their end result that I didn’t care about. We all sent things back and forth to each other, I took bits of code that those latter people had written and brought it back into my code and changed it for my purposes.
It’s not structured, or set, or enforced, or even conventional. It’s just people doing what they want to do. Some spin-offs are “better” or “more famous” than the original projects that spawned them, because more people found them a better product, or more conducive to accepting new code, or just friendlier people to deal with, or they had a greater public profile. Things like LibreOffice, which started from OpenOffice, which was originally StarOffice.
It’s not an organisation, it’s not any one organisation, it’s not an individual, it’s not any one individual, it’s not a set of rules, it not any one set of rules. It’s just people doing what they want, with code that says they can do what they want with it (to a certain extent).
Hell, I once wrote a patch for an open-source game purely because it was driving me mad that there wasn’t a particular simple feature in it. I just put it online once it was done… people were free to take it, ignore it, put it into the game, I didn’t really care. But the only intention for me, ever, was to fix a personal annoyance. I have no idea if anyone ever downloaded that patch.
One much larger project of mine ended up being ported to the Nintendo DS, PS Vita, etc. by other keen programmers. None of them wanted to do all the legwork I’d done – which I did to port it to an obscure Korean console – but once I’d done it, they all took my code and ported to platforms that they wanted to play it on. So I know they used it, liked it, several of them contacted me (but they didn’t need to), and probably my code has spread further than that now too.
It’s not a “thing” with set rules. It’s just people giving stuff away that they made themselves. Sometimes people find those things useful, and sometimes a community forms around them, and something they explode beyond all reasonable predictions to become extremely popular with people dedicated vast portions of their life to them.
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