I'm happy if the upstream project is concerned with the quality of commits going into their software. That makes sure that the software will work great and it'l

I'm happy if the upstream project is concerned with the quality of commits going into their software. That makes sure that the software will work great and it'll be easier to fix a bug in the future (if the history is reasonably clean) Basically, if upstream doesn't accept your patch, you have two options: Either you really want to see your patch upstream. In that case you invest the time it takes knowing that your contribution will be measured by the same scale that everyone else's contribution has been measured with. You also know that your contribution will be usable and part of a stable project. And you'll be confident that it probably won't be your mistake taking hundreds of sites down that are using the project you contributed to and are now hitting a bug you introduced. On the other hand, you can feel that it's not worth the hassle. That's totally fine. You'll just have to manage your patch on your own from now on (in the end maybe creating an even bigger hassle in the long run). Git gave you a very nice toolset for merging patches to an externally updated project, so that should be way easier than it was in the SVN days. What Github did was to actually make it possible to decide either way. Before Git and Github, your options were to either have it integrated upstream or to be stuck with whatever version you were patching (due to severely lacking merge support)