What it takes to participate in Open source projects?

There was a query on Javaranch regarding participating in Open Source projects and I made an attempt to provide somewhat elaborate reply to it. I thought of putting up  the reply on my blog as well and may be update it further for the help of others.

Participating in Open Source projects would take a lot of effort and dedication. Its because one has to:

  1. understand how the code works,
  2. play around with it,
  3. explore the documentation,
  4. understand the code and not get bogged down by the volume of code
  5. be active on the mailing list,
  6. go through the bug list to see if something you can fix,
  7. submit a patch for the bug, hope it gets accepted,
  8. repeat 6-7 until core members of the project start recognizing you and possibly trust you with the permission to directly merge the fixes to the codebase.

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