> And if some random person wrote, say, a feature-request feature for HN, I'd probably have to spend more time cleaning it up
In open source projects that's certainly true the first time, but if that process of correction is transparent to the person sending in the patch, then they eventually learn the ropes well enough that you don't have to correct their future patches, and in fact, they can correct the patches of others.
There's a pretty big gap between wrangling a small group of people sending patches and being a full-time project manager. For the couple of widespread-ish OSS projects that I've started they took maybe an hour a week until I handed them off to new maintainers -- another nice possibility that arises from having additional contributors.
(Note: I don't mean to imply that things necessarily should go this way, just that the process can be somewhat more rewarding than it would seem at first.)
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> And if some random person wrote, say, a feature-request feature for HN, I'd probably have to spend more time cleaning it up
In open source projects that's certainly true the first time, but if that process of correction is transparent to the person sending in the patch, then they eventually learn the ropes well enough that you don't have to correct their future patches, and in fact, they can correct the patches of others.
There's a pretty big gap between wrangling a small group of people sending patches and being a full-time project manager. For the couple of widespread-ish OSS projects that I've started they took maybe an hour a week until I handed them off to new maintainers -- another nice possibility that arises from having additional contributors.
(Note: I don't mean to imply that things necessarily should go this way, just that the process can be somewhat more rewarding than it would seem at first.)