You already contribute by growing the community. Software benefits from network effects. E.g. a large hurdle for Libreoffice adoption is the fact that many documents are in the MS proprietary formats. Messengers like Signal or Telegram are in the same boat. As the community grows, the chance increases for someone to contribute by coding or money, or hiring the lead devs for support contracts. It doesn't have to be you, but if you (and others) hadn't used the software before them, that person might not have used it in the first place.

Yes, you can increase your value to the project thousandfold with more direct contributions like coding, bugfixes, donations, community work, etc, but already being part of the community is of help.

Those effects are vastly overstated.

https://lwn.net/Articles/825602/

If you participate in the community, you can be a boon or you can also be a drag (if you just use the software in the privacy of your home, report problems and ask questions, without every giving back in any way, not even by answering other folks' questions).

If you want your open source developers to eat, they need cold hard cash.

From the lwn link above:

> Words fail me to express how beyond-utterly-broken the existing TDF / desktop model is for the ecosystem around selling Desktop LibreOffice.

> Collabora - despite C'bra still putting a lot of work into LibreOffice Desktop, having an outstanding support capability, doing lots of marketing, being the largest code contributor to LibreOffice, and having lots of existing happy customers / references for desktop LibreOffice, ... etc. etc.

> We have not had -one- -single- -new- Collabora Office customer since 2018 - zero.

(for context: the former LibreOffice development team of SUSE joined Collabora in 2013, so they're not a scrappy new startup completely disjointed from Libreoffice)

> If you participate in the community, you can be a boon or you can also be a drag (if you just use the software in the privacy of your home, report problems and ask questions, without every giving back in any way, not even by answering other folks' questions).

Whether problem reports are a help or hindrance depends strongly on the type of report. A low information "it broke" post is a hindrance. A high information post giving steps to reproduce, having looked for similar bug reports, giving system details needed to reproduce the report, should be a help.

Thanks for linking the E-mail, it was a very interesting read!

200 million users means the community is huge. Not every project is in a situation like that. It means that Libreoffice creates tremendous value around the globe, and extracting just some of that value means the development efforts can be grown.

There are positive things in that e-mail as well: many large institutional users do contribute back.

Also note that well researched bug reports can be helpful for the community, especially if you post workarounds you found into the bug thread, and the thread is accessible by search.

As for Collabora, I'm not sure how much they engage in marketing? Maybe if they increase such efforts/change strategy they can grow their number of customers.

As a major Open Source contributor, I'd say that advocating the software goes a long way.

For example, in one of my last job (I'm a freelance), I could get paid full time to contribute to open source tools because the guy taking the decision heard about PostgreSQL and open source somewhere. If that guy has only heard about Oracle, the same work would have gone closed source.

If the person responsible for the office solution of a school heard of open office from you, you did help a lot. Because many times, big open source users will invest in open source, in form of support, custom development or just sponsoring.

You contribute to its popularity. People want their software to be used.

Easy: send them some money. I do, at times I even sent money to projects I deem important though I'm not actually using them, like FreeBSD and OpenBSD.