Not every committer has the rights to release or make high level decisions, so we can be much more liberal about giving out commit rights. That increases the committer base for code review and bug triage. As a wider range of expertise in the committer pool smaller changes are reviewed and adjusted without the intervention of the more technical contributors, who can spend their time on reviews only they can do.

The rise of agile coincided with the rise of startups using open source projects. At first, startups just incorporated those projects into their own software. But like any cultural exchange, open source began to affect how startups built products, too.