I've often wondered what it would be like to work on Open Source projects and contribute to something like that, but I've never done it before. This post piqued my interest, so I read it and followed the links and read the comments and, in general, spent more than an hour on reading the discussion.

Which leads me to my question: is this normal, widespread behavior in Open Source? I'm honestly interested in answers, because, frankly, to me this looked like a boatload of politics. I get enough of that at work.