I'm still not sold on Github being the actual solution here -I think that it happens to be where a great deal of functional communities have formed, but I've also seen a ton of projects that are a total disaster. When an "upstream" owner doesn't take patches, the usual result is that there's complete chaos and mutually incompatible forks with the same name and version information spring up.
Functional communities can and do exist without Github. In fact, I find patch review on maillists to still be a lot easier than on most of the new DVCS-centric hosting sites.
Also, perhaps the best thing is to be less shy about offering patches? I've had pretty good luck with just spamming someone with my patches and saying "here you go, thought you might like this." Some don't ever provide feedback or take the patch, but those are far and away the exception to the rule.
When an "upstream" owner doesn't take patches, the usual result is that there's complete chaos and mutually incompatible forks with the same name and version information spring up.
If the upstream owner doesn't accept patches the project is hosed, regardless of how it's hosted.
The big difference with a DVCS is that those chaotic forks are public and can themselves accept patches. Developers can still pool their bug fixes, added features, etc., and perhaps the project can rise from the ashes.
If the project is hosted on a centralized VCS, all of those bug fixes and new features languish as one-off forks in private repositories. Instead of being a chaotic mess, it's moribund. You still have the same issue of having to maintain your own fork; you just don't have any help in doing so.
Thanks for articulating it better than I could have.
This is exactly my sentiment. There's been over the last two years an occasional sense that the Flot guys have held the project hostage in some ways because for a long time it was the only viable library that did things the "jQuery way" with a sufficient number of fixes to remain stable on IE.
Late into the project (where they stand now), it sucks to see important patches languish because the maintainers aren't vigilant or have more important things to attend to. The fact remains, visualization is now a fairly important component for a fair number of people who are working on data/analytics applications. It's easy for people to bandy about anecdotes of other projects or maintainers which do well on mailing lists and non-DVCSes .. but in this case it's not working terribly well for the Flot guys.
So technical merits aside, this is why people might wander away from Flot and to projects like Dygraphs, beta warts and all, all because of issues not relating directly to code. Github may not be a panacea but when you see people like John Resig saying stuff like "I'm loving the influx of new contributors to jQuery core since moving to Github.", it must mean they're doing something incrementally better :)
It's time for project owners to ease up on the reigns a bit, and I'm pleased to see more and more interesting projects hosted on github for this reason.
Functional communities can and do exist without Github. In fact, I find patch review on maillists to still be a lot easier than on most of the new DVCS-centric hosting sites.
Also, perhaps the best thing is to be less shy about offering patches? I've had pretty good luck with just spamming someone with my patches and saying "here you go, thought you might like this." Some don't ever provide feedback or take the patch, but those are far and away the exception to the rule.