I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but one thing I would
argue is
that opening up the technical tools is absolutely central.
To me a key question is "can you have an external package maintainer?"
(and parallel questions like "can you have external translators," etc.)
Because the governance and decision making should be based on
maintainers/contributors, and that means there's no outside decision
making until you have a way for outsiders to be maintainers and
contributors. Of course people are contributing today, but there are
certain limits on what they can do from outside Red Hat.
It's not like most open source projects have any formal decision making
policy. It's really rough consensus of the core contributors.
I know this is not the most functional example - but big projects like
distributions and other large projects do have some established
hierarchy - and sometimes they have a process for making those
decisions.
-sv