Repelling drive-by contributors usually pertains to people who want to dump massive amounts of feature creep into existing FOSS. There's a legitimate place for

Repelling drive-by contributors usually pertains to people who want to dump massive amounts of feature creep into existing FOSS. There's a legitimate place for not adding Bobs massive feature list all at once because you don't know if Bob will be around after 2 years and you end up cutting most of them because you can't figure them out. The last place biting drive-by contributors should apply is for bugfixes. Bugfixes are one of the most common ways beginners/newcomers are incentivized to contribute (and keep contributing), especially to FOSS. Even Stallman, who otherwise is someone who I would not consider a good example for any kind of communication, implicitly acknowledges that if you're a maintainer, you should try to work with people submitting patches to get them merged rather than antagonize them because of your possible maintenance burden[0]. [0]: https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html (see the how to learn to program section, which while largely bad advice on actually learning how to program, does have the nugget that "fixing bugs is a great way to get into FOSS dev" and "most maintainers will be happy to receive your patches and work with you to get them formatted and correct", which is imo implicit advice for maintainers to be kind to new contributors.)