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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In short, yes, that is a very common thing to have happen. What matters most, however, is actually writing the code to add whatever idea is involved. “Open source” means the source code is not just available, but able to be modified by anyone. If it’s your idea and you have the skill, make your idea a reality and give it to the project leaders. It could become a permanent feature available to the whole world this time next week.
In practice, each project has its own rules you will have to abide by, from programming style to how you submit your new feature, to how long before it becomes an official part of the program, and so on and so forth. That said, my name is on a few features on some software you might or might not have used in the past. I’m not affiliated with any of those people or groups, but my work was accepted.
An idea without code is just a feature suggestion or a bug report. Someone else will have to write the code for it, and that will be subject to their own time/schedule. In that case, open source isn’t really much different from closed source applications. Open source is just usually more transparent – you can see your idea get developed from the sidelines, or a good explanation as to why it was rejected.
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