> protocols, conventions, failsafes, QA teams, etc, etc that are either still hugely difficult to contribute to (Linux kernel, web browsers, etc)
To be fair here, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that once you have "software development skills" it automatically gives you the ability to fix any code out there. The Linux Kernel and web browsers are not hard to contribute to because of conventions, they're hard because most of that code requires a lot of outside knowledge of things like hardware or HTML spec, etc.
The actual submitting part isn't the easiest, but it's well documented if you go looking, I'm pretty sure most people could handle it if they really had a fix they wanted to submit.
To be fair here, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that once you have "software development skills" it automatically gives you the ability to fix any code out there. The Linux Kernel and web browsers are not hard to contribute to because of conventions, they're hard because most of that code requires a lot of outside knowledge of things like hardware or HTML spec, etc.
The actual submitting part isn't the easiest, but it's well documented if you go looking, I'm pretty sure most people could handle it if they really had a fix they wanted to submit.