As a maintainer of several open source projects for now 3 years, I regularly meet people, mostly about an open source contribution. This allows me to experience all kinds of interactions. Most of them are collaborative and great, and keep me thrilled to work in open source. But some of them are spoiled by common beliefs or preconceived ideas about open source. So I’d like to bust one today.

When a user submits a bug report on PrestaShop open source project, we thank him for the report and ask if he is willing to submit a Pull Request to fix it. To which some people answers “I’m sorry? Why should I fix the bug myself? Why should I do your job?” and that is actually a very important and relevant question.

To the 1st time open source contributor, to rebase a branch might look both obscure and scary.

This blog post is intended to help people willing to understand better the process to contribute to a github opensource project for the 1st time. It does not explain “how” to use the github fork workflow but rather “why” it is used and why it seems so complex the 1st time you look at it.