> I just quietly do so in a fork on github and that's it That is assuming they use GitHub or a moral equivalent and it isn’t instead buried in sourceforge or g

> I just quietly do so in a fork on github and that's it That is assuming they use GitHub or a moral equivalent and it isn’t instead buried in sourceforge or god help you some dusty SVN repo. The nice thing about GitHub is it dramatically lowers the barriers to contributing to open source projects. I remember before pull requests you’d have to generate patches using arcane commands you’d copy and paste from some website. Then you’d email the diff to some mailing list and hope for the best. Pull requests are perhaps the best thing that happened to open source.