A bot which does lossless compression on images in open source projects and only submits a pull request (with all the relevant details) if there was a > X percent filesize savings? That's not spam, that's just helpful...
You might log in one day and find that your repo has pull requests from fifteen image optimizing bots, thirty-eight prettifying bots for different languages, four .gitignore patching bots, seven <!DOCTYPE inserting bots, eight JS semicolon removers, nine JS semicolon inserters, twenty-four subtly broken MySQL query sanitizers, and seventy-nine bots fighting over the character encoding of the readme file.
These slippery slope arguments are a bit silly. If you're running an open-source project, you can either accept PRs or not, and if you're accepting them, you can review the code and approve it or not approve it. A PR from a bot is the same as a PR from anyone else, it's either helpful or not helpful. It's not currently a problem, and it's too early to speculate about worst-case future scenarios.
Is that what they said about SMPT and spam?
You're missing a key point here. The difference between PRs from bots and people is that there is a balance of effort on the part of the person giving the PR that bots do not have. PRs take time and effort to evaluate on the part of the repo owner. A PR from a person has a higher chance of being a meaningful change as the person had to spend their own time and effort to offer it. There is also a consideration of the nature of PRs from bots. They will necessarily be of a certain class of actions and in the vast majority of cases be low effort, low impact changes. Having these compete with PRs from actual people is not a good direction for github.
Also, the slippery slope retort is getting tired. We can and should use our reasoning skills and historical precedence to evaluate likely usages of new rules (you'd be negligent if you didn't). In the case of bots, the possibility of having repo owners spammed with low value changes is enough to disallow it.
Humans can easily look at the existing pull requests and see if their work is redundant. Bots can't. And as hackinthebochs said, human-submitted pull requests involve effort which limits them.
It's not really a slippery slope argument. It's more an application of what we can see having happened with bots in the past. Email spam for legitimate offers is, after all, just about as annoying as email spam for scams.
It would also make GitHub a much more intimidating place to submit code. I don't want those things for my smaller projects.
https://github.com/github/github-services/tree/master/servic...
The account in question has been closed now, but it submitted thousands of pull requests to random projects to advertise their build service.
Even if it was the best build service in the world, as a hacker I wouldn't personally use it.
That was also a troll/spam bot that had no affiliation to Travis CI. Their GitHub integration has always been classy.
Either they insert something in your pictures that you don't realize is there, or just good ol' spam (like Travis4all), or a backdoor that looks like a fix…