We have no idea why the people at github did not merge this PR. Maybe several people on the team left the company. Maybe they were pulled into a project which will have higher revenue. Maybe so few people have this problem that this improvement isn't a priority. Maybe it breaks some other internal functionality that someone uses.

We have no idea whether this "would improve their own product" because we don't know what their product is, their product roadmap, their staffing, their budget, or any of the innumerable factors which affect whether a company chooses to spend time and energy and effort and money when implementing a feature.

So why do we presume?

We should not have to presume. Since Github is soliciting contributions to linguist [0], they've created an obligation to engage with outside contributors and explain their decisions. When the author wrote his blog post, there were over a hundred PRs and apparently no acknowledgement of many of them from Github. In his "How to destroy your community" talk [1], Josh Gruber refers to silence as "the most effective community destroyer of them all".

I'm not actually trying to call out Github, by the way. It's great that they've written up guidelines for contributing [0], and a glance at the PRs shows much more engagement now.

[0] https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.... [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/370157/

So why does GitHub not reply with comments about why this PR is not a good fit for this project? Or if it is too tedious to reply to every PR, put up a general guideline on "what we don't want in pull requests".

I mean, one can defend his/her decision or adopt changes if the PR is not exactly what GitHub wants. But being ignored? There is no solution.