Totally agree with this. Been a free software advocate my whole life. It's all about freedom to tinker and contribute should you wish to. If you use computers y

Totally agree with this. Been a free software advocate my whole life. It's all about freedom to tinker and contribute should you wish to. If you use computers you'll know when the time comes to do that. It's usually when the software doesn't quite do what you want or there's something you need that nobody has thought of yet. It's up to you whether you just hack it for your own purposes or put in some extra effort to get the code merged upstream. Definitely recommend the latter if you want to learn how to contribute to a live codebase (free or otherwise). But don't go in with the goal of getting something merged, it's got to start with your problem. Anecdotally, some of the best hackers I've known have started off as kids building things like game mods and chatbots and the like. Then later they've learnt how to do it "professionally". The worst are the ones who know how to make a pull request etc but have never been through the trenches solving a problem that nobody else has.