Why are you looking to contribute to open source projects? If you have a fix or a new feature, you can share the diff in variety of ways. The maintainers are not obligated to review, discuss, and accept your changes.
I’m not entirely following you. I generally don’t contribute anymore, but in the past I’ve found a lot of maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration, rather free labor.
I certainly understand things are different nowadays, I’m talking pre-LLM proliferation.
> I’ve found a lot of maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration, rather free labor.
Do you think that maintainers lack domain expertise? A nice bug report is way more helpful than a random pull request. A patch, even when correct, can be counterproductive, if it conflicts with the roadmap and goal of the project.
The goal of open source is to give you freedom in maintaining your own version and extending it. Collaboration is not a requirement.
