I have a curious love it / hate it relationship with opensource projects. Take open office which Ive used for a while now. Its great for a free program and means I dont have to support an evil empire but there are many things that bug the crap out of me about it. It suffers from featuritis.... too many chiefs syndrome.
I like how currently there are multiple arduino clones popping up by well motivated individuals seeking to carve out niche applications using alternate main boards. These are however individually driven projects. To me the best part of the openness is the latitude for all these fringe type projects to flourish.... This includes not only the hardware but software and documentation as well. Whether anything from these alt sources ever become incorporated into the main project ultimately depends on how successful the smaller projects become and how motivated the individual.
I respect the foundations need to rein in a little and retain some control over the core concepts of the main Arduino project while leaving the rest of us free to run away with stuff. Keep the lid on the core Arduino if nothing else because they have to support it.
Compare the Arduino to the Basic Stamp... in its first 10 years the BS had 3 million units in circulation. Thats with extremely centralized design, support and distribution teams. It must be intimidating for the foundation, now with 10k out the gate, to even consider 1 million! Anyway, I really support what Massimo, David, Dave, Tom, et al have done up to know and am not sure I see a compelling reason to change it.
Ill stop rambling,
Brian