The open source bit allows the ultimate step of forking the whole project, and that is important to me to be able to do that, but it's not a trivial step at all, and a lot of the usefulness is in the name recognition and the userbase.
But really, I want to contribute to the original project, and given I am not the original developer, it still relies on the them (and any other founders) to open up contributions. Fortunately, in this case, they have :)
I'm one of the Trustroots contributors, you're right about the governance topic, we have a do-ocracy approach right now (described a bit at the bottom of https://www.trustroots.org/faq/foundation). I'm actually keen to evolve this, with a more specific approach to community-governance, but this thinking and these talks take time.
> This is the real issue. Governments restrict housing supply for whatever misguided reasons and prices go up, those prices make it a good place to park cash. Government should stop picking winners and losers.
Restriction of housing is not limited to Government, housing developers also do it:
"[Kate] Barker reached a similar conclusion in her interim report, where she noted that in order to maximize their profits, developers control the rate of production and ‘trickle out’ no more than 100–200 houses a year from a large development. ‘This may not be desirable from society’s point of view,’ she wrote." (from https://www.annaminton.com/bigcapital)
Personally, I trust the reasons that a Government would limit housing more than I would a for-profit company who are probably operating in the interests of investors who don't live in the affected areas.
Even more than Big Government control though, I would prefer the people that live in an area to have the biggest say into how things are run.