I think they're referring to an article that made the rounds a few days ago (can't remember which) that decried the requirement of Adobe Illustrator for participation (citing as evidence the ratio of icon requests vs pull requests).

I tried taking designs from other folks. The quality wasn't good enough, so I stopped.

Ah, so the old "you don't like my pull request, so I will tell people you're not Open Source". Classic.

Some people apparently think "open source" means "anyone can commit whatever they like to the main repository", which is odd.

- Can't do pull requests on the graphics. - Can't download the svgs.

The only thing that is open source is the implementation.

Can't do pull requests on the graphics?

https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/pull/1823

Can't download the SVGs?

https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/blob/master/font...