The GNU definition of free software (and the 4 freedoms) make it clear that it is about users, but only inasmuch as their private rights to do what they want on their own computers. There is no sense that openly welcoming community patches is something that is involved.
1: It's entirely possible that the community has opened up more recently, but Lucid shipped a fork of Emacs in the 80s for similar reasons to the complaints about clojure today.