zlacker

Are there actually open source developers that wander from project to project with one-off contributions that are of significant value? This seems to optimize for that specific scenario, and it’s not something I’ve seen in practice.

The contributions I’ve seen from such people in the open source projects I’ve worked on ranged from zero to negative value, and involved unusually large amounts of drama.

I can imagine things are different for some projects. Like maybe debian is trying to upstream a fix?

Even then, can’t they start the PR with a verifiable intro like “I maintain this package for debian.”?

For the other 99% of welcome contributions, intros typically are of the form: “I was hired to work on this by one of the industrial teams that maintain it”