Governance

I see this as a valid concern.

If you approach something as a hobby, where the doing of the thing is where you find value, then it won't matter if you end up doing the thing differently later because things changed abruptly.

But if you approach something as building to persist for others (whether or not for profit), then it's important to minimize investments for which the value suddenly drops to zero, such as investing significant time into using a PHP framework that suddenly becomes unusable for one reason or another.

The code being open source and suitably licensed allows forking into a new project with different people, governance, etc., but that does not preserve the original project and the community involved with it, It only preserves the fork and its new community, which might consist of a single individual who forked it. For those who invest development time or other resources into non-hobby projects using the original project, the survival of the original project matters.

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So far, the Foundation has never set the project’s direction per se - it was always community-driven.

"Never" and "always" might be misleading here, because CI was not always the Foundation's project. "Always" and "never" in the context of CI includes its ownership by EllisLab, which I believe did not leave direction of the project to the community until it transferred the project to BCIT.