I have always felt that, in a "typical" open-source project, I could approach the community, join it, build some rapport, and eventually help with the decision-making process (assuming I was any good and people in the community liked me).

But with Google-run (or other company-run) open-source projects, it's a completely different story. Want to be a TensorFlow maintainer? Great, sure, you can contribute, but you'll never get to make any decisions about the direction of the project itself unless you're inside Google.

To me it's a disappointing semi-abuse of the term "open source"... it doesn't mean what I think it should...