> The cold reality is that most open source projects aren't really TRYING to attract contributors. Small-time hobbyists often don't want to play with others in their personal project sandboxes, and big-time projects with high profile usually put up high barriers to contribution.
I'd say there is a large amount of projects between these two extremes, and Github makes it relatively easy to get contributors "accidentally", by making it trivially easy to contribute. And a small percentage of those will probably stick around.
For small contributions (e.g. bugs due to different configuration of my system that are trivial to recognize and catch, errors in the documentation, properly describing a bug or crash I see) GitHub is really quick. With other projects, figuring out how to get post access to the bug tracker and how to check that the bug hasn't been reported yet, or reading up on where and how to submit code changes probably takes more time then dealing with the issue itself, and I'm not going to bother.
Not saying that other places can't be similarly quick (I'd say Bitbucket and GitLab probably are), but many projects hosted on their own infrastructure are worse about that.
I'd say there is a large amount of projects between these two extremes, and Github makes it relatively easy to get contributors "accidentally", by making it trivially easy to contribute. And a small percentage of those will probably stick around.
For small contributions (e.g. bugs due to different configuration of my system that are trivial to recognize and catch, errors in the documentation, properly describing a bug or crash I see) GitHub is really quick. With other projects, figuring out how to get post access to the bug tracker and how to check that the bug hasn't been reported yet, or reading up on where and how to submit code changes probably takes more time then dealing with the issue itself, and I'm not going to bother.
Not saying that other places can't be similarly quick (I'd say Bitbucket and GitLab probably are), but many projects hosted on their own infrastructure are worse about that.