I've happened to be looking at a number of other free-software projects recently (having nothing to do with compilers) and find the quality of the code ABSOLUTELY APALLING. The formatting is random and very hard to read. There are almost no comments. There are few, if any, indications of what each function is supposed to do. And many of these projects have no documentation AT ALL except for some small FAQs or Wikis.
When we ask "why is contributing to GCC so hard", we must never forget that a large part of the answer to that question is that we have much higher STANDARDS than most free-software projects in terms of code quality and documentation. I don't believe that lessening those standards to increase contributions would ever be a good thing in the long term.
