He describes a social problem which is very dependent on the actual maintainers, but blames it on the mechanism.
Yeah, some projects have prickly/uncooperative maintainers... so what? That's true regardless of the collaboration mechanism used, and there's no obvious reason why pull requests make this problem worse than other mechanisms.
Indeed, I would guess that pull requests make things better than many other methods, because they (1) make it much easier to review changes, (2) make it much easier for the submitter to update his changes in response to comments, (3) handily keep the discussion and patches all together in one easily accessible place, and (4) maintain a record of the request, helping to avoid the "forgot about it" problem that you get with e.g. patch requests on mailing lists ("Subject: ping" :).
Frankly, given the attitude in his rant, it seems pretty likely the problems he apparently has with maintainers aren't entirely the maintainers' fault...
It doesn't seem like he's ever committed to open source before because none of this is new. So maybe Github is the problem in that it lowered the bar for this guy to put in just enough effort to get his feelings hurt.
I didn't read that in his post. He seemed mostly to be troubled by how easily the process can be derailed by going off topic on getting lost in details.
Yeah, some projects have prickly/uncooperative maintainers... so what? That's true regardless of the collaboration mechanism used, and there's no obvious reason why pull requests make this problem worse than other mechanisms.
Indeed, I would guess that pull requests make things better than many other methods, because they (1) make it much easier to review changes, (2) make it much easier for the submitter to update his changes in response to comments, (3) handily keep the discussion and patches all together in one easily accessible place, and (4) maintain a record of the request, helping to avoid the "forgot about it" problem that you get with e.g. patch requests on mailing lists ("Subject: ping" :).
Frankly, given the attitude in his rant, it seems pretty likely the problems he apparently has with maintainers aren't entirely the maintainers' fault...