Why? Maybe they talked on video chat or a screenshare, or a messenger like slack. Forcing people to use a possibly less efficient communication method just to have a hard record of their contributions seems like the hallmark of an extremely dysfunctional and distrustful development organization.

open source projects that want public funding should do stuff like that in the open. and record it.

You say this definitively, as if every OSS project uses GitHub exclusively for all communication. This is obviously not the case.

They’d use something visible or their process is borked and not transparent and not welcoming to new users.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a listserv, or an IRC channel, or a GitHub issue. But it does matter if the collaborations are invisible to the team and to others on the project.

It’s their project so they are welcome to organize as they wish, but for a healthy open source project, I think having some collaboration method where newcomers can understand all the meaningful and helpful discussions is a good thing.

If a super awesome person is doing 1:1 calls/DMs/Emails all the time, that’s going to be tough to maintain. Not to mention a pain for any work where it’s multiple people collaborating and coordinating a changes that impact each other.

irony really is dead. The creator of git still uses the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Though I can certainly think of a dozen other ways to communicate that aren't GitHub or Slack.