I'd be pretty leery of limiting who can send pull requests, but what Github needs to do is make it very clear that the big "merge pull request" button is usually a BAD idea unless it's a doc-only change. They should

- create a branch or tag containing the merge so that it's easy to pull the change without having to add additional remotes.

- provide instructions on how to pull, merge and push the request saying explicitly that the merge should be inspected and tested before doing the push.

- make the latter more obvious to click than "merge pull request" button

EDIT: I'm not saying that Linus needs this, but responding to Linus' comment about it being much too easy to do poor-quality commits.

I think it would be nice if "pulling" would create a new branch (with a specifiable name) per default so that you can run tests and merge to master locally.

That sounds like exactly what Linus does with pull requests on LKML.

Well, he already has a dedicated team of admins who've set up a system for him - kernel.org. He's only using github temporarily until his usual system comes back online. It'd be a bit of a shame for Github to go to all that effort only to have Linus abandon his account by the end of the week.

Hardly, he maintains probably one of the biggest git based source controlled projects in the world. If he has these issues then it's likely that using the advice to improve upon the current system will also benefit others running sizeable projects and attract more large customers.

Linus' feedback would make GitHub ready to support larger projects, regardless of the kernel staying or not.

Supporting larger projects can't be a bad thing, that wouldn't be wasted effort.

That's exactly what I was trying to say. Thanks.