They didn't necessarily "choose communities to represent". As the maintainer and author of various open source libraries and tools that are used by many thousands, in most cases it's just that ... I'm one of the few willing to spend the time on it, and it's usually useful for myself as well. I don't really "represent" any community or anyone.
That said, I certainly wouldn't have put in this change myself, because I wouldn't like to inconvenience anyone. But that's just basic good manners that you should have in every-day life to random strangers.
That's a very different thing than joining GNU. If your package gets adopted by thousands of peoples that's having this community thrust upon you.
I still feel you have an obligation to transfer to someone willing to shoulder the responsibility if this happens, an obligation incurred by publishing it in the first place.
Jim Meyering made the change, who has been maintaining these things from before half the people here were born.
Even when taking over maintainership for popular packages later on, people often aren't exactly breaking down the door for it. So my philosophy is simple: "if you do the work, you get to decide". I may like or dislike these decisions, and at times I may even rant about how stupid a certain decision is, but in the end ... the people doing the work get to decide. The alternative of being beholden to a vaguely defined "community" of armchair quarterbacks is much worse, IMO.
Well, if I write some software for my own use, put it on the internet "because why not?", and lots of people start using then that's nice. But ... I don't think putting anything on the internet automatically imparts any kind of responsibility towards "the community", which usually means "people who download and use your software, the overwhelming majority never give anything back in the form of code, bug reports, money, or anything else".
But like I already said in my previous comment, I wouldn't have made this change myself. I actually strongly disagree with it. But I can also accept that other people have a different attitude, and that's okay too, even if I personally don't really care much for the particular attitude.
Funny you mention OpenBSD, because OpenBSD is very much "by the developers, for the developers" and has a fairly decent "fuck off" attitude once people start making demands (which I don't think is a negative per se).
That said, I certainly wouldn't have put in this change myself, because I wouldn't like to inconvenience anyone. But that's just basic good manners that you should have in every-day life to random strangers.