One thing I've learned about contributing to open source is that it's primarily a social achievement.

If I see a developer who has contributed to many oss projects, I don't think "wow this guy must be a great programmer", I think "this guy must have great communication/people skills".

Often (especially with popular oss projects such as apache, python, firefox), you can fix a bug, add it to the ticket tracker, and it'll just sit there and rot. Every day people fix bugs and upload patches. You have to contact someone and sweet talk them into merging your fix.