How is this different from any of the millions of open source projects on GitHub, SourceForge, etc, including, oh, Linux? Mono? Managing and merging revisions is what source control systems are for.
What’s required to make public source revisions manageable is to have an actively engaged authority to review proposed revisions and accept/reject them. This usually ends up being the original author for smallish systems, or an autocratic team for larger projects. To take community revisions into .NETMF, Microsoft would need to designate someone to be the autocrat. Given that much of what Microsoft does is consensus driven, this isn’t likely to happen by company decree; it will only happen because someone feels passionately about the task to step up and do the work without corporate blessing.
A development community that has the ability to view source and propose revisions (via forked code) and build from source shouldn’t be sitting around bellyaching that MS isn’t fixing bugs fast enough or shipping new releases fast enough. In an open source project, the community bears as much responsibility for continued development as the original author.
Now, if bug fixes are being written by the community and MS is not reviewing them in a timely manner for accept/reject, that is something you can complain about, but ultimately it still does not prevent the community from carrying on independently of MS.
-Danny