Quote from: Searing on April 05, 2015, 04:04:57 AM

power corrupts...you need some kinda rules/setup to tweak the bitcoin core...and perhaps pay for coders etc.....not sure ...how does it work for linux stuff?

Any company (a few obvious examples would be Red Hat, Canonical, Google, IBM) is free to hire developers and/or find volunteer developers to contribute to whatever GNU or Linux projects they want. Those developers submit patches just like you or I could, if the project's developer community (especially core devs) likes the patches they get included. Some of these people eventually end up getting commit access or even being core developers on their chosen project. For companies like Red Hat and Canonical who package their own Linux distributions, if their patches aren't accepted upstream they're still free to maintain those patches and package them with their own distro.

No central authority is really needed beyond those people who have commit access on GitHub (or wherever else the code is stored) reviewing patches and deciding which ones to merge.