This bug still bugs Alice.

When she forgets about the workaround, the bug still bites her. Lately, some of the other people who hang out on her anime forums have been complaining about this bug, too, and she always points them to the forum thread where she learned about the workaround. But still she wonders: when is it going to get fixed?

And then she wonders: is there anything I can do about it?

This crucial step is what makes FOSS unique: it's the step at which Alice decides to become a collaborator.

Why? Good question. Contributors to FOSS have many different reasons -- but a frequently heard rationale is the desire to "scratch an itch." Alice loves Inkscape, but she hates this bug.

She thinks back to the forum discussion in which one of her friends advised her to "file a bug." She's not even quite sure what that means, exactly, but now that she's decided she wants to help, she starts looking around. After a bit of googling and sorting through some stuff that doesn't make any sense to her at all, she finds a page on the Inkscape wiki that tells her what to do.

One sentence stands out: "Check the bug tracker first; your bug may be already there." So she goes to the Inkscape bug tracker and searches for "crash", and finds a ton of bugs -- seems like software crashes a lot! She tries a few more search terms (like "copy" and "paste"), and the number of bugs she has to look through starts to drop. Alice's search through the bugs uncovers a great deal that she doesn't quite understand... until she finds a bug that looks almost exactly like her bug! She sees some comments on the bug that say things like "I've confirmed this on my Ubuntu system" and so on -- so she creates an account for the Inkscape bug tracker, and adds her comment, confirming that she, too, has experienced this bug on her Mac Powerbook. Two months later, she receives an email that the latest version will contain a fix.

Even a seemingly small collaboration can be useful.