[reedlaw]

I'm concerned that many programmers who use mostly OSS (e.g. web developers) never submit a single patch to any of the multitude of projects they benefit from. Clients save millions of dollars because dev agencies leverage tons of free/open-source software. If programmers do a proper job they should routinely come across bugs or incompatibilities in at least a few of the myriad gems, node modules, etc. What could be more natural than for the developer to fix the bug and send a pull request back to the maintainer?

When looking at candidates I almost always find some correlation between a meaningful public commit history and quality.

[watwut]

Most small open source projects ignore pull requests. So, it is not really worth it.

[juwiwoowiwuuw]

I'm not so sure about this. My experience with contributing to (smaller) OSS projects on github have been mostly positive. However a few projects won't review/merge patches possibly because they've been abandoned.

[reedlaw]

In that case I'd make my own fork and leave it there for anyone else who may have the same issue.