Too many of us who work with open source software in our daily lives think of ourselves as users, people who merely take advantage of open source tools without considering ourselves as an integral part of the development process. That's right. By working with an open source tool, you're automatically part of that tool's development process. You are not a user. You are a contributor. Whether you're a good contributor or a bad contributor is up to you—you still have a responsibility.Look at it this way: in the proprietary software world, an application's development involves more than just the people who write code. There are whole departments dedicated to quality control, documentation, and marketing. Most open source projects don't have the luxury of having those departments. We are those departments. And, generally speaking, we aren't great at our jobs.
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