25 ways to improve an Open Source project

Samisa, one of the committers on Axis2/C has posted a nice blog on 25 ways you can help that project. Reading through them, I realised that they are applicable to almost any project. I think this is a great list.

A lot of people looking at an Open Source project assume that there is this divide between "users" and "committers" - that the separation between contributing or not is black and white. The reality is that there is no black and white. The most useful contribution that a project receives all year might be something as simple as:

• Finding and documenting a sneaky bug
• Letting the developers know how their project is being used - so they focus on real-world use cases
• Suggesting a simple improvement that transforms the project from being ok to being great

So my advice to people who use Open Source software is this: give a little back - even if its tiny.