as a maintainer, I don't like turning down all this work you've done for free I empathise with that perspective, and I appreciate any work that an open-source

as a maintainer, I don't like turning down all this work you've done for free I empathise with that perspective, and I appreciate any work that an open-source maintainer does to contribute to a project, so thank you. I must confess, I often submit patches without prior warning or discussion. They almost always come out of client work: I've been asked to deliver a requirement, so I do what I have to do to deliver that. When I have to modify upstream code, I know that my use-case might not be appropriate for everyone (so I try to explain that in my comments). But even if I think it's a patch that isn't going to be accepted, I generally post it anyway: partly for the few people who might share my use-case, but also for me, in my next project, where I may run into the same problem again. Sometimes my PRs are nothing more than a note-to-self. A lot of the time that's been dictated by client policy: projects where I could only modify third-party code if there was a published upstream patch for the changes. So if I have to modify upstream code, I have to record a patch/PR upstream, to comply with client policy. But I do understand that the answer to the PR may well be "no".