Were you around before github? It was extremely painful to contribute to any opensource project, back then. Some projects were on sourceforge, others were on se

Were you around before github? It was extremely painful to contribute to any opensource project, back then. Some projects were on sourceforge, others were on self hosted svn near project homepage, others were grouped in community efforts like savannah.gnu.org ... It felt back then as you had to know maintainers personally to contribute to a project. Most of the time, you had to mail people to ask how to contribute (thus, patch mails are kind of obvious). Centralization is indeed a problem, but I think we should all thank github for having standardized how to find opensource projects and contribute to them. This really gave opensource (especially opensource libraries) the kickstart they needed. And now, this centralization is lowering with concurrent products like gitlab, so everything is fine.