I raised a ticket on an open source project about a defect. It was open for 6 months with no comment. So I fixed it and did a PR. The PR was still sitting there open after 6 months. More interesting PRs to the developers have been merged.

Attention and stewardship are not universal.

What I usually do when I see promising projects and slow devs.

1. "This one issue is what is stopping me from using this product. Is this current method preferred by your users or do you have any other reason to not want to change?"

2. "The proprietary solution costs $X per month. Is there any way to sponsor development? I am willing to give $X/n (where n is whatever number you are comfortable with) per month to get this issue merged and to have some sort of prioritization when triaging issues.

3. Failing those: write a blog post and propose a fork. This is usually the quickest way to get a reaction from narcissistic developers.

Maybe some of these developers are just, you know… busy.

It's the busiest developers who would be interested in receiving PRs. If they go unanswered for six months, it is a clear signal that there is something stopping else them from action.

Do you think busy devs who also run open source projects tend to have plenty of time to set a high priority on FOSS?

Is Dark Table just a side-project from one busy developer?

> It's the busiest developers who would be interested in receiving PRs.

Depends on the PR. Bugfixes sure, but new features mean more work for the maintianer in the future.

It is also an opportunity for someone to feel involved and eventually join the group, perhaps even become a maintainer.

Speaking as a project maintainer that is starting to see some traction: I'd love to see people coming with PRs for features. It would mean a big amount of validation.