[mhkhung]

It happens to OSS projects all the time and simply discourages further contributions.

Last year I took on an issue that has been opened for years, did all the work creating a pull-request, updating test code, yada yada, even another one that fixes their build problem. The maintainer took the PR to fix their build problem and simply ignores the original issue. Any chance I will spend my time contributing to that project again? No way.

[da768]

Some people have their whole "GitHub resumes" built off copy-pasted contributions.

1. Open PR

2. Get comments asking for changes, you only have time to fix it a few days later.

3. PR gets closed as fixed by another PR submitted by a frequent contributor.

4. Find said PR is your exact code with a variable name change (approved instantly through lower 'friend' review standards)

5. Look at that user's profile and notice almost every contributions were copy-pasted from other people.

[fragmede]

Woah, that stinks! Any you care to name and shame?

[da768]

Won't do, but apparently building up your contribution score helps finding a job at Google.

[brabel]

As a maintainer of small projects, I love when people contribute code or tests. I try to help them get the code in a good place with regards with the rest of the code base (this is the hardest part, as most developers do not follow project conventions as they just want to push the fix without first having to learn about that), but will accept patches as soon as I see that the code is approximately right and just needs another 15 minutes of my time after merging to "polish" it up and perhaps add a few more tests and things like that... I think that was the case here, and the maintainer should've done that. The person would get the credit, the maintainer would just spend a few minutes doing the necessary clean ups to get it accepted upstream, everyone would be happy. Saying "my version is better" is extremely obnoxious behaviour and unprofessional, regardless of whether it's actually better. If you haven't fixed the issue in 6 years since it was first reported, you should admit that without the person's contribution there just wouldn't be a fix by you, so taking the fix once you've been shown "a solution" is really kind of stealing.

[turtlebits]

IME, code projects want bug reports/improvements as contributions, not your code. I see people taking it personal when their code isn't accepted/rewritten, but overlook that writing code a small part of what it takes to run a project.

[caconym_]

Isn't there a switch somewhere on Github (or cloud repository provider of choice) to disable public pull requests? Maintainers who don't want code contributions should avail themselves of it.

[PaulKeeble]

Its a common problem. I often go through a bunch of bug reports and merge requests to ascertain how a patch will likely be treated. I have walked away from fixing quite a lot of bugs in projects as they didn't appear to be very good to contribute to, the Linux kernel being one such example back in 2003. Some projects are just like that and you are best not engaging with them as its likely going to be a waste of time.

Not that it matters now, since the AI revolution the open source licenses are widely breached and I haven't submitted any open source code since and wont do so again.