There Are No Good or Bad Open Source Contributors

At OpenSearchCon North America 2026 last month I gave an impromptu unconference talk called How To Not Be a Bad Maintainer or Contributor. I was purposefully opinionated and a little controversial, because I wanted to hear other opinions.

Why talk about this at all

I’ve been a contributor, a maintainer on projects like Apache OpenNLP and opensearch-migrations, and now a member of the OpenSearch Technical Steering Committee. I’ve been on both sides of a pull request that sat untouched for months, and neither side was my best work as a community member. That’s why I think “good contributor” and “bad contributor” are the wrong labels. They describe people, when what we really want to talk about is behavior.

Contributors

Most friction between contributors and maintainers comes from a mismatch in context. Closing that gap is mostly the contributor’s job, and it’s cheap to do.

Open an issue before a large pull request so you learn whether the change fits before you spend a week on it.
Explain the why in the pull request description and link the issue it addresses.
Keep changes small and focused, since small changes get reviewed in days and large ones in weeks.
Follow the project’s contributing guide and conventions, even when you’d have done it differently.
Stick around after the merge instead of disappearing when a reviewer asks a question.

Maintainers

Maintaining is often unpaid and mostly invisible, but maintainers set the tone for the whole community. A few habits go a long way.

Respond to new contributors quickly, even if only to say you’ve seen it, because silence drives people away.
Say no clearly and kindly when a change doesn’t fit, and explain why.
Write down how decisions get made so contributors don’t have to guess.
Treat a first contribution as the start of a relationship, since today’s typo fix is next year’s maintainer.

The TL;DR

There really aren’t good or bad contributors. We all sit somewhere on the scale at any given time, and a great maintainer can have a bad month just as a first-time contributor can do everything right. What we can do is keep the fundamentals in mind. Communicate early, assume good intent, respect other people’s time, and follow through on what you start.

Open source is about people

Open source is about the connections between people, the humans who show up, review each other’s code, and slowly build trust. Projects survive because those relationships survive.

AI has a place in how we write software, but not in that relationship. A pull request generated by a model and submitted by someone who can’t explain it isn’t a contribution. It’s work handed to a maintainer. Open source is about us, and I’d like to keep it that way.

Thanks to everyone who came to the session, especially those who disagreed with me. If you want to keep the conversation going, or you’re looking for help with search or OpenSearch, please reach out.