One interesting (and depressing) aspect of post-Github open source development is the use of the pull request as a passive aggressive way of putting off potential contributors, users and testers.

I have had the experience of discovering an issue with a piece of open source and raising an issue for it only to be “invited” to contribute a reliable failing test case, with a fix and all to the project’s contribution standards.

Now the joy of open source is being able to scratch your itch and prioritising your own problems by contributing solutions.

However there are often very good reasons why the maintainers should be the ones fixing the issues.

Firstly the maintainers should be the ones who gain most from fixing issues. One cool thing about Git-based development is that forking allows you to use existing codebases but not share the views and priorities of the original project. If I disagree with the direction or design of a project I can fork it and completely change the code to match my own aesthetics and priorities.

However in most cases I agree with the direction of the maintainers and I am simply pointing out an issue or problem that maybe they haven’t encountered in their context. I could scratch my itch but it is often more effective if the maintainer took my use case into consideration and reworked the codebase to include it.

Maintainers:

• have more context on the code base
• know more about the problems the code tackles
• know their conventions and coding standards better than I do
• have more invested in having an effective solution than I do

Looking at things like Guava which while open are effectively not open to contribution. This is a more honest approach than inviting non-trivial contributions.

Trying to take the perspective of the maintainer I know it is tedious when people do things outside of your area of interest (i.e. IE fixes when you’re not targeting that version of the browser or Windows fixes in a project targeted at UNIXes). However telling people to “fix it themselves” is not as honest as saying “that’s not our focus”. People can then decide whether they want to fork or not.