> when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access
It's important to tell the whole story here. Gavin stepped back as lead maintainer and appointed Wladimir. No one else.
Maintainership is the sole reason to have commit acccess. All changes to the software are made as pull requests. And commit access is only needed to merge these pull requests. Nobody commits directly on master without going through a pull request, not even maintainers.
Being the maintainer of an open source project is hard work and can be quite thankless at times. The role is one of a glorified janitor while still requiring the highest both technical and people skills.
It is not surprising people only do this for a few years, and as far as I can tell Gavin did a great job. I don't think that is in dispute. But he should not have commit access when he is no longer maintaining the software.
(It may also be of interest that Gavin stepped back from maintaining the software in order to focus on his role as "chief scientist" for something called the "Bitcoin Foundation". This foundation was comprised of a number of noteworthy people whose names keeps appearing and re-appearing in MLM schemes, "hacked" exchanges, and/or premined coins. Gavin may be the sole exception.)
Gavin being silenced is just a tip of the iceberg out of the continual banning and censorship of people discussing ideas around scaling Bitcoin Core chain since 2016. Most of the folks have left for other projects since then and all BTC is left is as a tether propped exchange pair while merchants give up on accepting BTC (thanks RBF too).
Bitcoin Cash on the other hand has been gaining merchant acceptance and I've enjoyed using BCH same like I did enjoy using BTC since 2012. The honeybadger of P2P electronic cash is truly unstoppable.
That's stretching the truth far too thin. Gavin was never being "silenced" by anyone. Ask himself yourself, he replies to email. It was very much his decision, and while he may have held some controversial opinions in the community, he never let this interfere with maintaining the software which he did in the best professional manner.
He makes no secret about his disappointment with some of the decisions (or, rather, non-decisions) around the project as of late, but this was several years after he stepped down maintaining the software in favor of his chief scientist role for the foundation.
It's important to tell the whole story here. Gavin stepped back as lead maintainer and appointed Wladimir. No one else.
Maintainership is the sole reason to have commit acccess. All changes to the software are made as pull requests. And commit access is only needed to merge these pull requests. Nobody commits directly on master without going through a pull request, not even maintainers.
Being the maintainer of an open source project is hard work and can be quite thankless at times. The role is one of a glorified janitor while still requiring the highest both technical and people skills.
It is not surprising people only do this for a few years, and as far as I can tell Gavin did a great job. I don't think that is in dispute. But he should not have commit access when he is no longer maintaining the software.
(It may also be of interest that Gavin stepped back from maintaining the software in order to focus on his role as "chief scientist" for something called the "Bitcoin Foundation". This foundation was comprised of a number of noteworthy people whose names keeps appearing and re-appearing in MLM schemes, "hacked" exchanges, and/or premined coins. Gavin may be the sole exception.)