How to Contribute to Open Source: Extensibility from Simplicity by Ryan Davis

506 views · Published 14 September 2012 · 20:51 · Indexed 12 November 2026

Channel: Confreaks · 2012 · Science & Technology

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The bar for contributing to open source is much lower today due to technologies like git & github... _or is it_?

It is now downright simple for developers to be able to fork projects and send pull requests upstream. As such, the number of forked projects and pull requests have scaled up. But all that burden has been shifted back to the maintainers of the original project. They're left with the decision to accept the patches as-is, reject them, or rewrite them in a more generalized form.

In other words, the maintainers are faced with the decision of increasing maintenance complexity, increased animosity / drama, or somehow distilling the underlying reasoning behind the change and abstracting them so they're usable by everyone.

The latter is both the hardest to do and the most beneficial to all parties involved and much of that effort can be done before the pull request even goes upstream.

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