2 min read

Making my open source, more open

Making my open source, more open

The cover image for this article is a photo I took while hiking around Bergen, Norway. This was just one of the spectacular views we got that day.

Every so often a new article appears touting some new functionality that GitHub, GitLab, or BitBucket have added... Well okay, not so much for BitBucket, but you get the point. No matter the site the article has found its way to, discussion usually devolves into talk of how these services are centralising a decentralised system.

Personally I'm quite happy with what the above companies and products have done for the version control space[1]. I do however, understand that many people feel like these are slowly erroding what is fundamentally meant to be decentralised[2].

As a small time open source maintainer, my projects don't get many changes submitted to them. Because of this, I'm afforded an extra level of flexibility in how I work and how those few patch submitting angels wish to work with me.

From today and until I arbitrarily decide otherwise, I'm open to accepting patches sent to me by email. If you'd like to submit a patch this way I'd suggest you follow the vague approach used by the Git project itself.

Why am I doing this? I want to keep my projects as open as possible, I want contributors to feel free to contribute in a way that they feel comfortable with. This may not always be the case, and if a project grows substantially this may become more work than it's worth, but for now I am able to offer the flexibility and so I would like to.

So if it's important to you that my open source projects continue to really be open, you can send me patches by email for now.


  1. Except Jira, I'm definetely not happy with what that's done for me.
  2. In my personal opinion, decentralisation was a means to and ends of making git capable of working offline for long periods of time and then merging back together seemlessly.

N.B: You can find my email address on this site, it shouldn't be too hard but I'm not going to make it easy for spammers.