Over the years, I have submitted a couple of pull requests to repos under the Kubernetes GitHub organization . None of them were ever reviewed or merged. And I don't mean rejected (for low quality, missing explanation, etc.), just ignored forever without any form of acknowlegement. Most of them even resolved existing issues and feature requests.

Yet, these repos have PRs that get merged multiple times a day. And if you look at the people who create the PRs and who approved them, it's mostly the same groups of people:

members of the Kubernetes organization

work at a CNCF-affiliated company (ex. Google, RedHat, Microsoft, Datadog)

part of CNCF's developer programs (ex. LFX Mentorship, GSoC)

So I was wondering, is Kubernetes actually open to outside contributors? To me, Kubernetes looks like a public collaboration between a handful of companies rather than a community project.

EDIT: to add more context, the PRs were very small and wouldn't take more than 5 minutes to find the context to review.…