Contributing to Open Source Software

I’m a big fan of Open Source Software. Although I’m sure I could get by if I had to move to proprietary based software, at the present time, open source software earns me a living. Because of this, at the start of the year, I decided to give something back and start contributing to open source. I chose the Zend Framework, because it is written in PHP and is a project I have a lot of interest in. I registered for an account on the bug tracker and signed the CLA, but that’s as far as I got. I started looking through some of the bugs available for fixing, but found that the simpler ones were being dealt with quickly by other people and the only ones left where a little too complex for me. I still plan to contribute before the year is over. I intend to use the framework for a project I have in mind and the frameworks current implementation of a client for Amazon Web Services needs adding to for the purposes I need, so maybe I can contribute that way.

Back to the point, today I think I found a bug in PHPUnit, I couldn’t work out how to submit a bug report via the website, so I emailed Sebastian Bergmann with a patch. I’m not going to describe the bug until I know for sure that I’m correct, but I’m at least 90% sure I’m in the right. So, if I am right, that’s my first solid contribution to open source software.

Update

Well it seems I was right in reporting the bug, but it appears Sebastian didn’t like the patch I sent, or more likely it didn’t work. This changeset looks slightly different to the patch I submitted.

Index: PHPUnit/Util/Metrics/Function.php
===================================================================
--- PHPUnit/Util/Metrics/Function.php   (revision 2707)
+++ PHPUnit/Util/Metrics/Function.php   (working copy)
@@ -449,7 +449,7 @@
         }

         else {
-            $this->crap = pow($this->ccn, 2) * (pow(1 - $this->coverage/100, 3) + $this->ccn);
+            $this->crap = pow($this->ccn, 2) * pow(1 - $this->coverage/100, 3) + $this->ccn;
         }
     }