| Yes, although mostly in small, incremental ways. I try to use entirely free and open source software on my personal laptop (and I'm fortunate enough that my work environment is fairly similar too). When I encounter some kind of annoying issue, I'll take a look at the code that caused the problem (and sometimes the components that it interacts with), and if there's a way to improve the situation then I'll consider putting together at least an issue report. In practice the time and thought required to write a code-level description of the problem can sometimes be 90% of the work to develop a fix, so frequently the issue report is followed swiftly by a patch / pull request / merge request. Review, merge and release can all take time - at various points I've had over twenty changes pending to more than ten separate projects. It's extremely satisfying and encouraging to wake up or check your email and be reminded about some kind of nagging bug/problem that you encountered months or even years ago and to hear that it's now solved for you and anyone else who would have run into the same issue in future. A suggestion, although everyone can learn in their own way: consider treating open source contributions the same way that you might do for small tickets or tasks at work. |