[ttgurney]

My first open-source contribution was a two-line patch for a bug I found in Eclipse while at work.

Eclipse is known as a Java IDE, but it also provides a widget toolkit and other libraries for developing desktop GUI apps. At the time I was working on a team that had a huge desktop app built on top of Eclipse.

The bug I found was pretty trivial; it was something related to incorrect sizing of one of the widgets in some corner case.

The process was a bit of a pain relative to the size of the change. I had to write a test case, sign a CLA (per Eclipse project rules), and of course one of my four different bosses had to review the change and sign off on it.

At the time I was a junior engineer still eager to prove myself, and I figured all of this effort would be worthwhile just so I could say I got a patch into a major open source project. Nowadays I wouldn't bother with so much process, and certainly wouldn't sign a CLA. Would rather work on my own projects. At most I might send a patch out to a mailing list.