On Tuesday at XDC2011 Chicago I hosted a question and answer panel about contributing to X.Org, Mesa, and the Linux kernel. Much of the information presented, however, is relevant to any open-source / free software project. The panel participants were largely graphics driver developers that started off contributing to open-source when at university and some of them have since moved on to working for major Linux companies, i.e. Intel and Red Hat. The talk was very interesting and Chicago computer science students were free to ask questions of them.