History: FLOSS Web Application with the most contributors with direct commit access to the whole code base

Tiki is the Free and Open Source Software Web Application with the most contributors with direct commit access to the whole code base.

• FOSS -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open_source_software
• Web Application -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_application (This includes Wiki, CMS, Groupwares or any application comparable to Tiki)
• contributors with direct commit access to the whole code base: The Tiki model is to encourage everyone to commit to trunk directly, wiki way and improve what they need improved, without gatekeepers. We trust that people will ask for help when they feel they need it. Everybody can watch and revert every single commit. In practice, if someone has a concern about a commit, it leads to a discussion and a compromise is found.

Tiki has over 500: http://info.tiki.org/article188-Tiki-reaches-500-contributors-with-commit-access

The second place seems to be Plone, with 450 core contributors

Some other projects have overall more committers if you count extensions, but they are not direct committers to the core. For example, in Drupal, there are core maintainers, who approve the commits.

Why is direct commit access important?
Direct access to the whole code base is important because it makes it easier to refactor the code and not be limited to what the core provides (say you are developing an extension and can't modify the core code)

While the idea of each commit (code contribution) being reviewed is appealing, you need a lot of active reviewers and it adds complexity and delays. In large projects, you end up with hundreds or thousands of yet-to-be-accepted commits. And because these unaccepted commits can be in a queue for several weeks or months, they can, at one point become invalid because another commit breaks them.

We want the "The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work" and avoid this dependency-hell between unapproved commits. Besides, since the vast majority of commits are just fine, reviewing each commit is taking resources away from regular development. We do feel however that it's worth it to have code review by the Quality Team during the Quality and Security phases of our LTS versions, as per our version lifecycle.

See also

• FOSS Web Application with the most built-in features
• FOSS Web Application with the fastest release cycle

• Free and Open Source Software Web Application with the most contributors with direct commit access to the whole code base