@Gilles I wouldn't have any problem taking questions like those, but not those two questions. The first problem is that both are asking for resources instead of asking a question that would be answered by a combination of resources and specific quotes.
The open source politics question is way too broad and asks too many questions. Only a few of those questions might be OK on Programmers. I would take the question about who does the work and the distribution of the networks, but probably not the others.
The activity level question I would reject since there's no problem there. It's just a request for information, something more suitable to a search engine rather than asking a room full of people.
As far as justifying these "sociology of open source projects" under our FAQ, I'd say it falls under software engineering. After all, I've read research papers studying the effects of networks in software development (an example, with regards to quality) in IEEE and ACM Software Engineering publications.
Other than Tortoise HG, what is a good GUI client on windows?
I've already looked at:
http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/OtherTools
The Whiteboard
The Whiteboard