My presumption is that the question is more one of social conformity. Consider &quot;why don&#x27;t you wear a suit?&quot;, &quot;why don&#x27;t you stand for the Pledge of Allegiance?&quot;, &quot;why do you eat fish on Friday?&quot;, &quot;why can&#x27;t you answer the phone on Saturday?&quot;<p>Those are structurally similar questions, with the underlying premise &quot;you are different.&quot; What obligation does the person who is different have to explain to those who don&#x27;t understand? Very little if any, I think.<p>Now, your presumption does have some merit. My experience says that it&#x27;s very minor. Very few people contribute to a project, and infrastructure rarely plays a role.<p>The FOQ even points out in the second answer, &quot;There have been seven website patches from the community in the last three years&quot;. How many more contribution do you think they would get if they switched to Markdown over HTML? And how much work would it be to convert both the website and existing practices? Is it worthwhile?<p>&gt; at odds with the nature of open source<p>Well, yes and no. &quot;Open source&quot; is applied to both a development model and a distribution model. My company sells software under a BSD license. I am the primary developer, though I&#x27;ve received a few patches and I paid someone to work on part of the code.<p>The development is all through my email. Do you call that &quot;open source&quot; or do you prefer a different label?<p>The difference is less entangled in the free software philosophy. You have the freedom to develop code for yourself and distribute it, and to ignore contributions. Compare that to your view concerning open source software, where there is at least some obligation to consider external contributions.