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I might be wrong, but Hipp does accept patches in a different way. On the Fossil SCM mailing list, I've seen him (and other contributors who have commit access) get patches from users and incorporate them into the project.

They do mention the user who contributed the patch instead of actually assigning the commit to him, though. Does that count somehow?

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We are more open to patches on Fossil because (1) Fossil has a BSD license, which is easier to accept patches for than public-domain and (2) Fossil is seen (rightly or wrongly) as less "mission critical" than SQLite.

And, you are right - in many cases people will send a drive-by patch but we will rewrite it rather than apply it directly: to make sure we understand it for long-term maintenance, to clean it up, and to avoid licensing problems.

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