"Contributing to open source projects is trivial: Make a change, create a patch, review and revise, have it accepted." When heavily involved with open source projects it's easy to forget what developers interested in contributing have to learn before even making the smallest first change.

The talk summarises some of the issues and questions students, long time developers, researchers have when faced with free software development. The talk mainly focuses on the technical issues, touching only briefly the (at least) equally large space of cultural differences of open development communities vs. corporate or even research environments.

Instead of providing pre-baked solutions to filling this gap the goal of the talk is to initiate a discussion on how to best talk your friends and colleagues into creating patches: Which strategies did work for you, which failed? Which resources do you generally use when mentoring interested peers? Where do you see most problems?