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Comment by hagbard_c | Hacker News Reader

> It's still Open Source, but only a self-selected group of maintainers gets to write and merge code, at least for the time being.

That is the way the BSDs are developed and they're free software. If you want to you can pull the code and modify whatever you want. Let them get the thing up and running first, then see how the project handles external contributions. If they somehow fail to see the brilliance of some external contribution a fork will soon take over from where they dug themselves in, something which has happened many times over in free software land: Firefox (took over from the Mozilla Suite), Libreoffice (took over from Openoffice), Nextcloud (took over from Owncloud), egcs (took over from gcc, later became the main gcc branch), etc.

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No, it isn't.

Ladybird [0]: "We will no longer accept public pull requests. From now on, code changes to the Ladybird codebase will only be introduced by project maintainers. [...] There will not be a separate process for submitting patches by other means."

FreeBSD [1]: "So you want to contribute to FreeBSD? That is great! FreeBSD relies on the contributions of its user base to survive. Your contributions are not only appreciated, they are vital to FreeBSD’s continued growth. [...] If you are submitting a simple patch to the src repo, please consider submitting it to the project’s GitHub mirror as a pull request."

[0] https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/

[1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributing/

Don't BSDs accept new contributors and patches tho? A long time ago I worked in the freebsd documentation project (translating th handbook) and it was pretty easy to join the core group. And ooenbsd pioneered anoncvs didn't it?

For ladybird it seems the group is closed to outsiders.

> And ooenbsd pioneered anoncvs didn't it?

That's not really relevant. "anoncvs" was just the ability to retrieve source code from the project's repository without an account, as opposed to being forced to download a tarball. It didn't do anything more than ladybird's public github-hosted repository[1] to facilitate contributions.

Think of ladybird's github issues like the openbsd mailing lists. If you start submitting good issues with patches there, and you do it often enough that they would rather let you merge your patches yourself, there's a high likelihood you'll no longer be an outsider. (I don't know this from personal experience with ladybird, but it's the vibe I get from their posts about the matter.)

[1](https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybirdP)

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