My personal addition to an otherwise great article.
Remember that you make your contribution because you or your company get something out of it. Don't expect any enthusiasm or kudos from the project's side. If these come, consider them a bonus. The contribution process will be slow. If you need the changes you are proposing, you will have to live with a fork or workarounds in your code for a while.
Explain all the above to your company. Expect them to be completely clueless on how open source works, even if they are developers themselves.
Personal anecdote on this: I had a team lead who insisted we directly submit a patch because "people would be thankful that we fix their code". And actually expected that they would have merged our fix before the end of our sprint.
Comments
My personal addition to an otherwise great article.
Remember that you make your contribution because you or your company get something out of it. Don't expect any enthusiasm or kudos from the project's side. If these come, consider them a bonus. The contribution process will be slow. If you need the changes you are proposing, you will have to live with a fork or workarounds in your code for a while.
Explain all the above to your company. Expect them to be completely clueless on how open source works, even if they are developers themselves.
Personal anecdote on this: I had a team lead who insisted we directly submit a patch because "people would be thankful that we fix their code". And actually expected that they would have merged our fix before the end of our sprint.