Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

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.

Every contributor is valuable, it's in the name, the definition of "contribute".

Any bar to entry is bad, it certainly never is the solution to a different problem (not being able to manage all contributions). If anything, in the longer run, it will only make it worse.

Now, to be clear, while I do think GitHub is currently the "solution" to lower barriers, allow more people to contribute and as such improve your Open Source Project, the fact this is so, is a different and other problem - there isn't any good alternative to Github (with broad definitions of "good") why is that and what can we do to fix that, if at all?

Proposed contributions can in fact have negative value, if the contributor implements some feature or bug fix in a way that makes it more difficult to maintain in the long term or introduces bugs in other code.

And even if such contribution is ultimately rejected, someone knowledgeable has to spend time and effort reviewing such code first - time and effort that could have been spend on another, more useful PR.

Quite obviously, any incidental friction makes this ever so slightly harder or less likely. Good contributions don't necessarily or only come from people who are already determined from the get go. Many might just want to dabble at first, or they are just casually browsing and see something that catches their attention.

Every projects needs some form of gatekeeping at some level. But it's unclear to me whether the solution is to avoid platforms with high visibility and tools that are very common and familiar. You probably need a more sophisticated and granular filter than that.