> Meanwhile, you may have to create a Github account and fork the repo for PRs, but I don't see any way for that to not be trivial It's been said. You do it w

> Meanwhile, you may have to create a Github account and fork the repo for PRs, but I don't see any way for that to not be trivial It's been said. You do it with a service built upon the traditional currency of open source: patches. GitHub-style pull requests are not an intrinsic requirement even for the kind of shiny web UI that GitHub wanted to build. It was, however, an important part of GitHub's lock-out strategy. If you build your startup so that the way that person B has to get their changes to person A is through a pull request, then you can make sure that not only is person A active in the market for Git hosting, but person B is, too. They'll need to throw their changes up on some Git hosting service, because it has to live somewhere. And if your startup happens to be a Git hosting service, that's good for you. And, hey! since it's a pull request, you can do more than strongly suggest that person B hosts their stuff with you, you can force it, by making it impossible for the pull request to come from off-site. You can't do that kind of underhanded "growth hacking" if you allow contributors to submit patches, because while pull requests are indirect, patches are self-contained. They are a unit of change. (I've referred to this in the past as using a strategy of dark patterns inspired by social networks.) I want to emphasize: "patches vs pull requests" is one matter, and "email vs web UI" is an entirely different matter. It's a 2×2 matrix, not a dichotomy. But this conversation has (annoyingly) run on as if it is "patches (which must be done through email) vs pull requests (which are done through point and click)". There's nothing that precludes GitHub from having built a web UI where today's "pull request" button ended with a "submit patch" button in its place. Nothing. > I don't see any way for that to not be trivial Yes, this is clear every time the conversation comes up. Something has happened wrt GitHub that causes people to a) forget how things looked before GitHub, b) have extreme difficulty imagining that things could work any other way—even when the other way is more straightforward and less convoluted than the way GitHub actually works. It's kind of nuts.