If you've never lived on freenode or one of the other support networks the community that develops open source is often very remote from the people that end up

If you've never lived on freenode or one of the other support networks the community that develops open source is often very remote from the people that end up 'supporting' it. People sharing expertise is why databases like MySQL and Postgres win for all sorts of people, and there are many ways to provide this support that has nothing to do with contributing code. A great example is melpa and marmalade for emacs. The difference between having a package manager and not having a package manager has transformed the open source project but all they are doing is mirroring a bunch of elisp. Sometimes just providing the infrastructure to make a project available is the only reason why the project is popular. npm anyone?