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> but then what?

Then you send the patch upstream, they incorporate and maintain it for you. Congratulations, you just FOSSed.

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> Then you send the patch upstream, they incorporate and maintain it for you

Firing patches upstream is still adding burden to the (likely already over-burdened) maintainers.

In an ideal world, if you want a patch upstreamed, you would be contributing to upstream maintenance (or at least donating to the upstream maintainers)...

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Fair, but it is less of a burden than just submitting a report with no proposed fix. Also, submitting quality patches regularly seems to be a good way to eventually become a maintainer, provided that both sides are interested (cURL generally is – at least that seemed to be the vibe at the last year's cURL Up event I attended).
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