That doesn't mean I'm willing to accept your patch. As soon as I accept collaboration, I need to worry about copyright on the contributions, whether they follow my coding style, and whether I'm willing to accept additional complexity for features I don't care about.
- There exist open source licenses (with copyleft) that disallow making it closed source.
- There exist other reasons to publish the source code: for example allowing the user to study it.
Technically you could just post the .pyc bytecode as long as you didn't care about it working on anything but CPython and compatible implementations.
Consider CC0 instead.
As a veteran open source contributor, I totally understand that dealing with open source communities has a huge cost to go with the huge benefit. Even just vetting patches can be a pain when you care about security and architecture and don't want to spend time endlessly explaining your choices.
CC0 allows you to provide maximum benefit should you opt out of "social coding". People can go ahead and fork your stuff, or just use bits and pieces, without needing to deal with licensing or crediting headaches. (Significant consumers still have to track provenance, though.)
Certainly I would expect amyjess and anyone else reading to exercise due skepticism and perform their own research and I respect them enough to expect that they will "consider" my suggestion rather than "blindly" follow it.
PS: Why assume everyone is "ill-informed"? We're all learning together forever: you, me, amyjess, other readers...
At the very least, I'm not going to make it easy for people to contribute. I'll keep the git repo private, go without a ticketing system, and just post tarballs full of code on a self-hosted website (I guess like the NetHack team used to do before 3.6, but they had a ticketing system, and I wouldn't). Maybe I'll even use a non-free license just to reinforce my "you take what you can get" policy.