What a queuing theory book says about why open source contributions sit for over a year

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A developer's PR to Jellyfin has been waiting over a year despite two approvals, prompting an analysis of why open source backlogs grow so large. Using queuing theory (M/M/1 queue, Little's Law) and Reinertsen's product development flow principles, the author explains how near-100% maintainer utilization causes exponentially growing wait times. With 200 open PRs and ~30 merges/month, the math yields a 6.7-month average cycle time by design. Proposed fixes include capping PR size, gating quality before review, limiting work in progress, prioritizing by value using WSJF, setting a review cadence, building a reviewer tier, and requiring feature proposals — all without needing additional maintainers.

My PR has been waiting a year, or the exponential curve behind open source backlogs