I have been looking for a place to give back to the Java open source ecosystem for a while now. In that quest I’ve downloaded and looked over a ton of open source projects. Most of them suck when it comes to initial buy-in costs on developers who might just want to give some of their time to the project. There are a lot of us out here that would love nothing better than to help you out on your project if only trying to do so wasn’t so painful. Let’s take a look at what I’ve seen on where open source projects go wrong and start driving potential contributors away instead of attracting them.