Observations
I file bug reports and — when possible — offer patches to Free/Open Source software I use in my work. It’s the Right Thing to do.
I recently (as in “past couple of days”) filed a bug report against nested model forms in Ruby on Rails 2.3.1, and attached a patch. The ticket has since received some discussion and the patch has been revised twice.
I also recently (as in “past couple of months”) filed two bugs on components in Adobe’s Flex SDK. The first one was a change request to change the commit behavior of the change event in the numeric stepper control, and had a workaround (easily convertable into a patch) attached. The second described an internal compiler error on invalid input, and had no patch attached since (as far as I can tell) the source code to Adobe’s ActionScript compiler is not publicly available. To date, there has been no public activity on the numeric stepper ticket, and the internal compiler error has been relabeled as a duplicate of an internal-Adobe-bug-made-public-but-with-lots-of-redacted-information, and has no additional followups.
I can’t make any comparison between these tickets because they’re on different technologies, different platforms, different degrees of difficulty to implement. But I still think the difference in response time is funny. (It probably also says something about organizational priorities, too, but there’s too much noise to say anything definitive there.)