To be honest, the fact that people trust you gives you a lot of power over people. Having another person's trust is more powerful than all other management techniques put together.
A consumer doesn't take anything away: he doesn't actually consume anything. Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one.
The big thing about distributed source control is that it makes one of the main issues with SCM's go away - the politics around "who can make changes." BitKeeper showed that you can avoid that by just giving everybody their own source repository.
