It's David Nolen and the way he runs his projects, making people sign Contributor Agreements and such. He wants to remain the BDFL which is fine, his project, but the downside is that people are less enthusiastic to contribute.
As a contributor to some of David's projects, I gotta say, he does a great job of helping you contribute. He walked me through every issue I had until I could make a meaningful contribution. The one thing which makes it hard to contribute, is that he expects very high quality code, which requires time. I think it is a good tradeoff.
Theres a 160 people in the Om slack channel. There's more ways to contribute than sending patches, and theres quite a lot of community effort behind Om Next these days.
