That may be true (not sure abuot the banning thing, I've never heard that story), but you're sort of missing the difference in spirit. Certainly the FSF in its early days was eager and active in recruiting new developers, and merging code from the community. Read all the early Gnus Bulletins for lots of examples.

If you wanted to see RMS's emacs source, all you had to do was ask and promise not to spread it around before he'd made a release. That policy may not have been a good idea in hindsight, but it certainly wasn't because of Stallman's desire to keep control over his "product".

Google, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be much in the habit of letting people see their code simply because they want to contribute.