I remember the infrequent releases and not-very-collaborative development from the GNU Project once upon a time -- you get a new release with an announcement on an announce list and availability on the FTP site, a couple of times a year or sometimes less often. And that's about it, because it's the maintainer's responsibility to maintain the code. (Of course, you can contribute patches which the maintainer can accept or reject, and you can fork the program if you want. And some of the projects did have public discussion lists, but not all of them, and not at first.)
This is still the way that NetHack development works. :-)
It feels like something of an anachronism now, but it highlights the existence of a distinction between free and open source code (you can exercise certain freedoms with respect to any release) and collaborative development (you can potentially help create the release without having a formal relationship with the developers). I know Google has also been criticized around AOSP for being less transparent and collaborative than the present-day norm. Maybe they should defend themselves by comparing themselves to the NetHack Dev Team!