Contributing to open source

I always feel that people do not contribute back to open source products. For example here everybody uses putty but I don't think any body have ever thought of supporting the product in any way. In fact you might hear a lot of them grumbling about the features it lacks :) I guess most of them do not even know that the software is open source or what open source means in the first place.

For some time now I have been trying to do what ever I can to contribute back to open source. This blog itself is an example. I also at times have filed bugs for the OSS I use. Recently for the first time, I actually donated money to a project which I felt was lacking in linux from the time I started using it. It is fully compatible mail client for M$ exchange. I have been looking for this since my university days (my uni had exchange which they could not handle and eventually switched to free mail for educational institutions from google).

For the time being I am using evolution OWA microsoft exchange support. It has a lot of problems but never the less some thing is better then nothing. A couple of times I thought of using outlook under crossoffice but for that I would need a licensed copy of outlook (M$ office). I decided against that when I looked at the cost of Microsoft office professional :)

Finally some time back I discovered this. Looks very promising and thats where I have made my first donation to open source. I hope that I will continue doing this with softwares which makes my life easier :)

Update 25th March 2009
A few days ago gnome 2.26.0 was released. Native MAPI support is included in this release. So most probably next release of ubuntu code named Jaunty should have it. The only quick review I could dig up of this support is from some one who tested it in February.