[mcguire]

All of the companies I've worked for have had no problem with an engineer investing the time to fix a problem in an open source project and doing the work to feed the fix upstream---that's the fastest way to get a problem they're having resolved, correctly and permanently.

On the other hand, many of the engineers themselves haven't had the interest in doing the work to contribute the fix. They fix the problem apparent to them and go on, repeatedly fixing the same problem when they are forced to upgrade (they don't upgrade willingly, either).

And then there's the projects that make contributing as difficult as possible. You not only have to diagnose and fix the problem, you have to update the tests and docs and build system (which I'm perfectly fine with, personally, in the name of quality if I know how to do so, which I may not since I don't have time to track everything) and you have to do so in such a way as to satisfy the whims of the project's real developers, which you as a mere user manifestly are not.