Open source code maintainers

I guess not all of you heard of this job in the open source community - a Maintainer.
The maintainer of a project is a developer in the project that is allowed to check in code into the project. He's entitled to this by the community and it is ofcourse based on his skills.

Yet, this can pop up some interesting ethic issues like what if the maintainer is from a competitive company to the developer who sent the code update? For example - AMD and Intel...

Looks like the open source community is highly reliable as it allows such a positions to exist - and yet keep the projects stable and reliable AND up to date.
In many cases, such communities include people from all over the world and all over the business eco system.
I've got my view over this from a good friend - Avi Kiviti. See here an interview with him.