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The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/Physiocrat on 2025-03-14 18:07:50+00:00.
Hey OSS folks, looking for your thoughts on a weird contribution experience with a project that “prides” being open source. I’m an unpaid contributor; their maintainers are paid staff.
I spotted a missing feature in their webapp—a UX tweak, standard in competing apps, that only I’d been advocating for. Discussed it on their Discord, and they told me to ‘ship the code,’ even hinting at a bounty.
I spec’d an issue and then built it (50 lines, not huge), submitted a PR, got feedback, and updated it quickly according to feedback. They asked me to wait for another in-progress PR to merge, which I did. Then a maintainer closed my PR, copy-pasted my code (my comment and a block of my code, and rewriting a few parts to match new template) into their PR, and shipped it—no GitHub commit credit, just a ‘thanks’ in the comments. Their reasoning: ‘pragmatic’ since their PR (a bigger feature) “needed my bit”, and they squash merge, so history gets flattened anyway. I am the only one that ever requested or talked about this feature, so not sure why they “needed it” in their PR.
I called it out on Discord—said lifting code without permission’s wrong, I would have been happy to rebase my PR if given the chance, and credit matters (especially as a first time outside contributor). They replied: intent wasn’t to diminish me, they rewrote parts of my code, and ‘open source means your work might not stick.’ Also said ‘squash merging means no commit credit’ and ‘sorry you feel that way.’ No fix offered.
The feature branch that they copied my code into did not require my feature, it was just on the same component. I don’t think there was any reason to need to copy my code into their PR. I feel like I had credit taken away for work that I did.
Any thoughts on this?
(edited for clarity)