I inadvertently became a member of the Mozilla project
Last month I reported bug 547654 in Thunderbird where scrolling caused display problems. First a QA engineer passed it to the right group, then the programmer of the affected code asked me to repeat the issue. Now the bug has grown to a full scale blocker and actually assigned to me! I have written a patch and with any luck it will be accepted and my initiation into Mozilla will be complete.
This is what I love about true open source projects. Literally anyone can walk in off the street (or the net) and overnight become a part of a project equal to any programmer who have been part of the project for years - as long as they are competent.
If only politics could work in the same way…
