Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

I think it's actually an understandable strategical move from Mozilla. They might loose some income from Google and probably have to cut the staff. But to keep the development of Firefox running they want to involve more people from the community and GitHub is the tool that brings most visibility on the market right now and is known by many developers. So the hurdle getting involved is much lower.

I think you can dislike the general move to a service like GitHub instead of GitLab (or something else). But I think we all benefit from the fact that Firefox's development continues and that we have a competing engine on the market.

In my experience, most contributors who are deterred from contributing because they can't use GitHub aren't particularly valuable contributors. I'm sure there's exceptions, but I haven't seen any for non-trivial open source projects I've been involved in. I might even argue that it could be good to have a slightly higher bar to deter low quality one time contributors.

I spent quite some time writing a patch for FreeBSD and Linux a few months ago, including getting to grips with their contribution process.

Both patches have been ignored thus far. That's okay, I understand limited resources etc. etc. Will they ever be merged? I don't know. Maybe not.

I'm okay with all of this, it's not a complaint. It's how open source works sometimes. But it also means all that time I spent figuring out the contribution process has been a waste. Time I could have spent on more/other patches.

So yeah, there's that.

It's certainly true that making the bar higher will reduce low-quality contributions, because it will reduce ALL contributions.

(aside: FreeBSD does accept patches over GitHub, but it also somewhat discourages that and the last time I did that it also took a long time for it to get reviewed, although not as long as now)

Although I have certainly created pull requests before that have been ignored so not sure GitHub solves this problem.

GitHub PRs don't solve anything about that, but I wouldn't have to spend (waste) time figuring out the contribution process. At least I learned a few things writing the patches. I learned nothing of value dealing with git email or Phabricator. It's just work of the boring and tedious kind.

Many projects have rules about what kinds of pull requests they accept. You would still have had to familiarise yourself with those rules, as well as the usual things like coding style, testing policies, etc.