> Don't ask permission. I'd go a bit further... I'm a programmer, but I've done several contributions to projects where I just corrected the grammar of the REA

> Don't ask permission. I'd go a bit further... I'm a programmer, but I've done several contributions to projects where I just corrected the grammar of the README (which, I imagine, some folks would think kind of rude, but I think it helps). Every contribution was accepted, and I think I was even thanked once! Also, I've seen, both at my full-time day job and on open source projects that there are some people who feel that they need to be told, explicitly, what to work on, and some who just dive in and start on something. I think that the author of this article fits, to an extent, in the first category; sometimes, those people ask for something, and are told (occasionally, alas, brusquely) "Don't bother me, get something done!" Perhaps we need to figure out how to build a bridge to these people... without giving the impression to the "dive in" crowd that they will have to be full-time hand-holders of someone.