This happened to me, to a T, when I submitted a patch to cloudfiles-python. The patch was beneficial to my employer (we really wanted to use server-side copying

This happened to me, to a T, when I submitted a patch to cloudfiles-python. The patch was beneficial to my employer (we really wanted to use server-side copying on RackSpace Cloudfiles), but I couldn't imagine that it wouldn't be useful to other people using the Python bindings in question. I actually ended up not implementing one suggestion (it involved project-contextual knowledge that I didn't have time to look into; I figured the maintainer could make the change if he wanted it), but the patch was pulled in anyway (after many months... apparently the service was not available to all Cloudfiles customers at the time). So this is more anecdotal evidence. Make contributions! I also made a fix to another project which involved 2 line changes. The fix does not have to be big to be significant in some way. New social coding websites make it easy. In particular, GitHub has very easy-to-use forking and pull-request functionality which I highly recommend using if a project you like is hosted there.