I think the author is missing an important point: You should also contribute to Open Source projects because you are using them. This is the most natural motiv

I think the author is missing an important point: You should also contribute to Open Source projects because you are using them. This is the most natural motivation for contribution. You care about the project not just because it's cool and Free Software and you want to exercise. You mainly care because you're using it everyday - be it your favorite game or an important library (like jQuery, Qt) you use at work. It is often most sensible to fix the bug where it appears, instead of working around it in your application. And with Free Software (aka Open Source) you can simply do that, without having to ask anyone for permission. Getting this bugfix/improvement into the official version is a separate step. But it is worth the effort, because the alternative is to maintain your patches separately from new versions of the library. Or, worse, to maintain workarounds for bugs in the library that might or might not be fixed in future versions.