Not accepting pull requests

It is obvious I don’t have a formal education as a developer or a SysAdmin. I mostly just cosplay as one on my LAN at night and on weekends. I have been a Linux enthusiast for about 17 years and I wouldn’t have nearly the fun I do with computers if it wasn’t for the open source world.

One of the things with open source is the fact that the source is open. Developers give their time, effort, and code away for free (as in cost and in freedom) and you can do whatever you want with the code (for the most part, licensing, yada yada yada, I’m simplifying). It is an amazing thing we all have access to.

Since I’m not a developer and don’t have any code skills, modifying someone else’s code or using it in a different project is a big mountain to climb. I can’t look at a project and imagine how to customize it for my use case. I am fairly good at reading docs, taking detailed notes, and reverse engineering. So, it is possible, just a big ask.

However, it is wild to me that people see an open source project and send in requests for changes instead of doing the changes themselves.

I have never tried to write my own programs or publish my bash scripts because I know the code would be a huge mess. I don’t want that out in the world and I don’t want to be embarrassed by it.

Recently, I’ve had a big change of mindset. I have read some blogs where people describe writing programs that are strictly for themselves. They never get published publicly and only run on the one machine for that one person. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that you can write messy, jank code and be totally fine with it on your own machine as long as it does the job you want.

You don’t have to publish publicly.

You don’t have to accept pull requests.

You don’t have to have an issue tracker.

To be honest, I have a lot of respect for projects that don’t accept pull requests and don’t have a mailing list. You are welcome to use it and if you want a feature, fork it and make it yourself. There’s nothing wrong with that!

Open source devs don’t owe us anything.

Along these lines, I’m going to start writing more code and scripts that are just for me and I’ll publish them on my Forgejo instance that is only accessible on my LAN. I will create more custom containers and put into my own registry. I will write more jank-ass bash scripts and stick into my own repo.

And no one will ever see them.

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