Yeah. And the same is actually true for teaching a college student who has ssh/web access to their university file server how to make a distributed git repository setup with real "pull requests" (where I tell you my URL and a branch) vs. teaching someone how to make an account on GitHub and use their web interface to make a repository and then use their pull request user interface to get data between forks. I know this as I teach lectures on git, and it is seriously two console commands on your server to set up a fully working git setup in the way git was designed to be used.

GitHub has managed to cause a culture around git that there exist problems that don't exist that they can solve, and then their solutions are one-off specific solutions that only work so well if you are willing to use all their other features and you get all your developers and users to use the service as well. You are correct that GitHub is every bit as much a walled garden as Facebook.

We're talking about Python core development. I just can't see the minor nuances of GitHub-style pull requests being a significant barrier to entry for new contributors.

It seems the familiarity of GitHub was actually a primary selling point.

> There were multiple reasons as to why I made that decision. One was that GitHub has basically built a social network of open source contributors. That led to various core developers telling me that they were comfortable with GitHub already and they were hoping it would win.

> Lastly, our BDFL prefers GitHub. Since the beginning of this whole decision process, Guido let it be known that he thought GitHub was the best choice.

I have no clue on how to generate a patch. But I did a fair amount of pull requests... It might be a generation problem.