I think Mike Shaver said it best when he stated (in a podcast here) that an Open Source project should do its best to let willing contributors get in and get out quickly. As a busy father, husband, home owner, and engineer - I don't have a lot of time to contribute to open source projects, so when I do have some time, I'd like my efforts to count. Ideally, it's best if I can find a bug to fix that will directly impact the user experience (as opposed to changing some software plumbing underneath that doesn't have any immediate user impact). In other words, as a part time contributor with not a lot of time to invest, I want my efforts to have some immediate visible benefit.

Furthermore, it's best to pick bugs (at least initially) that don't require full-scale immersions into software architectures to figure out the root of the problem. This wouldwill likely change ifas more time is spent working with such projects.

I just spent a half hour or so fixing a couple minor errors in the Basic tutorial in Inkscape. I had some back-and-forth conversations with MenTaLguY and Bryce on IRC and mailing lists earlier in the week where I learned that the tutorials, while deployed as SVG, are actually stored as DocBook format in the SVN repository. So here's how I did things using my OpenSUSE 10.2 box. Read the rest of this entry ...