Open source is sometimes simply groups of people helping each other out because they asked nicely.
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Should we incentivise open source contributions more?
"You use feature FOO a lot! You're probably an expert, have you considered helping with FOO issue triage on our bug tracker [link]?"
Encouraging power users to contribute back could certainly help when communities grow.
Dealing with merge conflicts is an important skill that I've seen many experienced developers struggle with.
My experience might be biased from helping teams migrate from svn to git, but I've seen problems with all VCS.
Good article on RSS on Techcrunch: without helping users with curation, or giving publishers metrics on what is read, it will continue to be supplanted by competitors:
