Today I found a mail from Bugzilla in my inbox. Bug 99099 got fixed. Strike!

The Eclipse Ecosystem needs and builds great communities. There are users, plug-in developers and committers and all can and are contributing to the Eclipse Ecosystem. Have you ever ask what you can contribute?

Well, there are several ways. For example, you can help other users and plug-in developers in the newsgroups, you can report problems you found in Bugzilla, you can discuss the project development with the committers and you can do a lot more.

I’d like to mention one way in this post, which is one of the things I love about Eclipse development and Open Source development in general: There is something that is broken or could be enhanced. You investigate it, you fix it, you submit the patch and it got applied.

It doesn’t have to be a big feature. Sometimes it’s better to start with something small. That’s what I love.

Update: In response to this post, Philippe Ombredanne has posted a nice article on eclipse.techforge.com, which shows how to discover bugs, find lines in the source code and prepare a patch. Thank you Philippe!