The value of drive-through contributions

I think it's easy for a project to fall into the grey area between "actively discouraging the drive-through contributor" and "making it always an easy and good experience for them", though. For instance, QEMU (which I'm involved with) gets some things right (we have a detailed "how to send us patches" document on the wiki), but some things not so right (we're nowhere near having any kind of "SLA", and if you're unlucky and your patch is in one of our unmaintained areas it's likely to go un-dealt-with unless you prod us several times and do a lot of the legwork in demonstrating that the patch is good). I think moving out of this grey area requires an active investment of time and effort from people in the core community, so it's not surprising if for many projects it gets starved of attention compared to the the work those core developers' employers are typically paying them to do... (I keep meaning to have another look at what we're doing here with QEMU, though, perhaps this article will be the nudge I need to actually do that.)