Found two bugs, reported them, sent patches. It was as easy as it gets. The idea that forking a repo, pushing changes to your own copy, then posting a PR is simpler than posting a diff on a bug tracker is bizarre.
When I moved my open source project to GitHub, contributions skyrocketed by roughly 10x. I attribute that to three things:
- contributors need to learn a single workflow to submit patches to any open-source project:fork and submit PR
- contributors already have a github account, so a significant barrier is removed for flyby contributions (no need to register a new user account to a mailing list / bugtracker / or both for each trivial or non-trivial fix.)
- network effects and improved visibility
Each of those may appear small by itself, but they combine into a significantly better experience for contributors.
Each of those may appear small by itself, but they combine into a significantly better experience for contributors.