I maintain a few open source repos on github, including the rails jquery-ujs adapter and several other projects [1], and I've seen the exact responses and behav

I maintain a few open source repos on github, including the rails jquery-ujs adapter and several other projects [1], and I've seen the exact responses and behaviors she describes, sometimes from people on my own teams. And it burns me up every time I see it. So much so that I wrote an article on the subject [2]. Quoting from my own article (yeah, I know): > More importantly, to open-source authors: realize that the worst thing we can do is discourage people from submitting patches or starting and engaging in conversations about our projects. I personally LOVE when people submit pull requests to my projects. I'm not always able to pull them in, particularly if they take the project in an undesirable direction. But I always try. Style doesn't match my "style guides"? I'll either ask you to fix the formatting, or I'll just pull your patch in and fix the formatting myself (it usually takes two seconds [3]). Documentation contains a couple inaccuracies or worded weirdly? I'll pull it in and change what needs to be changed. No tests? Ok, this one is a bit harder, but I'll either ask you to write a test, or I'll pull it in when I get time to write a corresponding test. Still, some code is better than none! Seriously, it irritates me to no end when maintainers discourage people from contributing. The only thing that irritates me more is when people act entitled to my time to help them fix some implementation of this free software, but that's another story. People who submit pull requests of any kind almost never fall into that category. Now, I do prefer people to open an issue before submitting a pull request, but that's only because I feel bad if they spend time coding something that is either going in the wrong direction or has already been fixed. But if you're willing to take that risk, by all means, pull away! [1] http://os.alfajango.com http://os.alfajango.com [2] http://www.alfajango.com/blog/communicating-with-engineers-and-contributing-to-open-source/ http://www.alfajango.com/blog/communicating-with-engineers-a... [3] In vim: `gg = G` There, formatting fixed.