Have you ever had an experience like, you're walking down the street, there's a piece of litter, and you kind of like, kick it by accident, your foot grazes it, and suddenly you feel a compulsion to pick it up and put it in a trash can? This is litter, it wasn't your problem, but then you accidentally touched it and it Became your problem, somehow the act of touching it tagged it as "yours" and now the superego says you're obligated to deal with it?
That's what open source contribution is like
@mcc one time i got on a train and the seat next to me had a load of cigarette packets on it and when i got up to get off someone told me off so i had to pick it all up.
that's what closed source contribution is like
@mcc never heard of a superego. i choose to ignore litter all the time
@mcc precisely!
@mcc "I saw something wrong, so I righted it because it was within my capability to do so" isn't an impulse I want to suppress. I've contributed to enough open source code & content precisely because what I saw was wrong, and I knew how to fix it, and I was already there, and so... I'm OK with that.
@formlessone however i would also prefer for there to not be litter in my neighborhood
@mcc No argument there.
@mcc @formlessone That's a feature of closed source: you can't see the code, so you can't know it's wrong.
@dolmen @formlessone oh trust me when using closed source applications I am often able to deduce something is wrong
@mcc @formlessone However, as you can't fix it, this can't become your problem as much as with open source.
(well, I'm not speaking about you, crazy hacker using a disassembler and an hex editor!)
@dolmen @mcc @formlessone Are you calling me crazy? Just because i re-vectorized an inner loop in some proprietary blob software to get a 70% speedup using nothing but IDA, VTune, and gcc?
I mean, you're not wrong.
@azonenberg @mcc @formlessone Now I want to know more about that crazy story! 
@mcc more often for me, I"m cycling and a plastic grocery store bag is floating around and so I ask it to blow near me and it does and I pick it up and put it in my crate, because housemate can use it as a poop bag, and I hope that somebody saw me do that and feels inspired that yea, some people do little things to make things better.
I don't know if that's like open source contribution. I'm really frustrated with Moodle right now.
@mcc ( probably will just give up on it b/c if it's got these barriers for me, it isn't gonig to work for others, either...)
@mcc but hey, the grocery plastics have been 2 in the last month :P and now I look for them...
@mcc but also if a breeze or some jerk knocks it out of the can it’s still tagged with you so people can email you to complain you haven’t put it back in the trash can
@mcc I haven’t picked up others’ litter for fear its tainted with Russian novichok. 
@mcc “you touched it last” was big among siblings in my youth
@mcc That’s how I became a Microsoft MVP for a Microsoft Office product I barely use(d)
@mcc otoh every project I have published to a public registry feels very much like litter I have dropped and refused to pick back up to toss in the bin.
Absolutely, contributing to open source can feel exactly like that. It's like you accidentally stumble upon a problem, and even though it wasn't originally your issue, you feel compelled to fix it. This sense of responsibility kicks in, and you become driven to generate solutions, much like how insurance provides a safety net for unexpected events. Just as insurance offers protection, your contributions help safeguard and improve the open source community.
@mcc so open source is trash? 
@mcc Yes, if you accidentally touch a piece of wayward trash, it becomes the exact same as if you littered yourself. I don’t make the rules.
@mcc If you see litter-and can remove it without Really fucking up you day, Make the World a Better Place! Set an Example! Tell people what you did! Carry a gun and shoot litterers-well, good example-but, not legal yet!
@mcc And then four months later, you get a letter in the mail asking if you want to relicense your kick to GPL3
@mcc yesterday on our walk my dog found another treasure: a discarded plastic shell of a tuna croissant. He carried it all the way home, about a mile. “Neighborhood clean up,” I quipped, as we walked past onlookers.