George is a perfect example of great contributors, who probably don't consider themselves such. This ties back to my recent post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2516698) and the "Why I don't contribute" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2510964) post from the other day. People don't realize that anyone can contribute, and many people do without knowing it.

Open source isn't put together by a few talented rock stars, and it's not a shark tank (or rather, it shouldn't be) - it's put together by people who care - intelligent and bright people working with other intelligent bright people towards a common goal.

Thank you George.

Thanks for taking the time to share this, bluesmoon. It's an excellent counterpoint with a broader perspective than my post.

I've learned a lot about this over the past couple of days just from the comments here, on Twitter, and on my blog.

A lot of it has been just learning not to lump all of "open source" into one big scary thing, but to find the smallest unit of work you're capable of doing, and to find a project with a supportive team who will be patient with you.

I think you are owed some of the credit for this story, as George found a project where his contributions are valued and the maintainers were patient with him.

For me, so far, this has been BDSM with Wayne E. Seguin, who goes WAY above and beyond to nurture this kind of environment for his projects and encourage contribution.

Thanks for sharing this. I think open source would have a lot more activity if newbies like me had George's persistence and maintainers had your patience.

George writes (about ayttm):

"When I learned programming, about 40 years ago, it was important to write small, fast, and dependable code. I had thought those days were gone forever and I would be stuck in a world of huge, inefficient programs written by non-programmers that moved me farther and farther from what was happening on my computer."

That sounds to me like a manifestation of Parkinson's Law, where any extra CPU speed or memory capacity is immediately filled with inefficient software bloat.

Absolutely love this post. I'm an open source developer myself, and I can sympathize with the ayttm folks. Many bug reports are brief, don't explain much, and (occasionally) seem standoffish. This was a really great read, and I think it's absolutely great that there are users out there like this.

I could do with a George or two for some of my projects.

What projects do you need help with? I'm looking to get started on some open source (non-developer) work myself, so if there's any cool projects you're working on (or even not-so-cool), fire me off an e-mail (vorbby@gmail.com) and I'd love to get involved in any way I can.

I wonder if a George can be grown, or recruited?

I had a George helping me with a couple of projects, people like that are uniquely useful. I don't think I've ever been so motivated to get coding!