alt Hacker News> because the alternative is to ban submissions from people without reputation, and that'd be very harmful to open source.
Hmmm, no? That's actually very common in open source. Maybe "banning" isn't the right word, but lots of projects don't accept random drive-by submissions and never have. Debian is a perfect example, you are very unlikely to get a nontrivial patch or package into Debian unless you have some kind of interaction or rapport with a package maintainer, or commit to the process of building trust to become a maintainer yourself.
I have seen high profile GitHub projects that summarily close PRs if you didn't raise the bug/feature as an issue or join their discord first.
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You can literally just attach a patch to a bugreport on debian…
Setting aside "make an issue first" because those too are flooded with LLMs.
> you are very unlikely to get a nontrivial patch or package into Debian unless you have some kind of interaction or rapport with a package maintainer
I did mean the "trivial" patches as well, as often it's a lot of these small little fixes to single issues that improve software quality overall.
But yes, it's true that it's not uncommon for projects to refuse outside PRs.
This already causes massive amounts of friction and contributes (heh) heavily to what makes Open Source such a pain in the ass to use.
Conversely, many popular "good" open source libraries rely extensively on this inflow of small contributions to become comprehensively good.
And so it's a tradeoff. Forcing all open source into refusing drive-by PRs will have costs. What makes sense for major security-sensitive projects with large resources doesn't make sense for others.
It's not that we won't have open source at all. It's that it'll just be worse and encourage further fragmentation. e.g. One doesn't build a good .ZIP library by carefully reading the specification, you get it by collecting a million little examples of weird zip files in the wild breaking your code.