[jerf]

I have a "pay it forward" sort of attitude personally. The open source world is probably the largest, most valuable commons in the world by monetary value. I can't even think of a competitor, honestly. There are plenty of communities that are very open about their skills and knowledge, but there is just no equivalent to the way I can pick up thousands or even millions of person-years of labor and just drop it into my project, and it does its thing without me having to study every subsystem individually or pay the the millions of dollars it would take to write it bespoke for me. For example, the 3D printing community shares a lot of designs but there is no design comparable to the Linux kernel, because, after all, how could a design or even quite sizable set of designs manage that?

My contributions, feeble as they may feel as a single contributor, is my way of making sure I'm not just taking from the world, but at least trying to give back. A payment of sorts. Open source may not generally demand such payment, but by Kant's imperative, if everybody takes and nobody contributes, there will soon be nothing to take from, so I really ought to try my best to contribute reasonably as well, even just in the form of reproducible bug reports, documentation updates, or a tiny improvement here and a tiny improvement there.