This is a wrong assumption.

Opening the code doesn't necessarily mean that external contributions are expected.

Reports of issues might be welcome, code contributions less.

I've seen too many popular projects polluted by low quality contributions. When they get merged without care, the project's quality degrades. When they accumulate, the load on the maintainers shoulders becomes heavy.

While you’re not wrong this is a confusing interpretation of the parent.

  almost always → necessarily
  talented, competent, meaningful → low quality

I love it when people contribute to my projects by opening an issue, discussing their idea, then contributing a clean PR with bundled documentation and tests.

Actively soliciting contributions isn't necessarily the way to get that.

Look at what happens with Hacktoberfest: there are hundreds of thousands of newer developers out there who want to earn their stripes by contributing to an open source project. The amount of work this creates for the projects themselves is enormous.

> then contributing a clean PR with bundled documentation and tests.

I've never seen this. No tests, un-clean PR. Describing them how to fix it would take more time than re-doing the PR myself. Of course maybe if I thought they were going to contribute a bunch more PRs it would be worth spending time training them but I've never had that kind of contributor.

I had one of these recently! https://github.com/simonw/shot-scraper/pull/133/files

They're /incredibly/ rare though.

Sure but the pipeline of increasing responsibility needs to be open to new recruits for the long-term viability of a project.

We all used to be dumb teenagers as well.