Hi Alessandro,
I do share your concerns. Hosting your projects is just half the problem.
The bigger problem in my view is that a large number of projects don't have an alternate way of accepting contributions, just GitHub PRs which force you to create a GitHub account.
I think it is worth convincing projects to offer an alternative. Most Apache projects are not GH-locked AFAIK but for smaller projects it might be overkill to self-host or accept contributions on several platforms.
I've spent some time thinking about this and I came to the conclusion that email patches + tools to support this workflow are a good alternative. It's low "cost" for projects to setup a public mailing list and use desktop tools to review and apply the patches and it offers contributors a high degree of freedom as they can choose their email provider and desktop tools and they are not forced to self-host anything if they don't want to.
I don't see why UI tools wouldn't make this process as friendly as GitLab/GitHub MR/PRs but I don't think they exist yet.
Also a standard text protocol for emailing the review metadata is missing.
--
Ion Savin
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