Once, I learned that someone wrote a "security patch" for another project that embeds mine. They focused solely on the part where their fuzzer caused a crash, t

Once, I learned that someone wrote a "security patch" for another project that embeds mine. They focused solely on the part where their fuzzer caused a crash, they wrote a patch that, in their mind, fixes exactly the problem they found. But the patch made no sense - it added a check mid-loop for something which was an invariant. The actual wrongness was in an entirely different file, it was passing invalid initial values, and checks needed to go there instead. I fixed the issue in my project correctly, and in the changelog I gave credit to the original person for both discovering the security flaw and providing a patch... that I didn't use. In another situation, I was using an emulator and it didn't read a file correctly. I read its source code for the first time, I fixed it, in what I thought was the right way. I supplied the bug report and the patch. The maintainer thanked me and fixed it a different way - a way that wasn't obvious from their code, but was a better fit. In another situation, I found a library that sticks out like a sore thumb and doesn't accept values that other libraries do (the standard they're all aiming for says the value is "implementation defined" so this is technically allowed but it annoys me). I raised a bug. I offered a patch. The maintainer had a bug up his ass about this particular value and told me he was changing nothing. Not much I can do about that. In conclusion: FOSS maintainers aren't endless fonts of personal validation for you. Some of them don't even want contributors. They already gave you the software for free, _and_ the legal means to fix it yourself. You can patch it, you can fork it. Your fork might be better than theirs! They might accept your bug report. They might review your patch. They might accept your patch. They might mentor in you how their project works. They might devote all their time to contribution management and never have time to write their own project. Each of these takes their time and energy. They don't owe you any of that. Not every project is a popularity contest, not every project wants your help. This is all OK.