I recently started using Observium (a great network monitoring package which you should use), and found that i had some useful patches to contribute fairly soon afterwards. I submitted a patch to enable bulk selection of checkboxes in JavaScript and it was initially rejected, in part because i included my own copyright header on a new file.
Novell's SMT (Subscription Management Tool) is a software update tool for SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE. I've had the dubious honour of working with it over the last few months on a client site. These notes were compiled as a result of installing SMT on three different servers, and interacting with various people in the Novell forums, especially the novell.support.sles.updates forum.