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/