I guess the whole internet and with it the whole economy relies on this small and bigger contribs. We all should be aware that the internet would be a completely different place if it wasn't for all this free tools, made by a lot of smart people. Calculating this as "Karma" is a well known approach as we are used to think of everything as a kind of exchange of "goods" as taught by traditional economic sciences. However, most approaches seem to take a Zero-Sum exchange into account (I give you X lines of code, you give me y Karma). I think in terms of OS and all the things that come with it, this is wrong. I like to think of all this as a Non-Zero-Sum game, maybe the biggest experiment in Non-zero-Sum-Games ever concluded. The sum and result of all that tools and libs created is much greater than the amount of Karma that can be handed out. I rarely contribute, but from time to time, I file a bug or fork/pull req. a repo, just because it became a normal behavior. I guess I do this just because I can. Keep your Karma and just take my Pull-Request.

You are interpreting "Karma" in the Reddit/HNs/Whatever-Internet-Social-Site sense. I am not talking about any exchange or point system whatsoever. I mean Karma in the original buddhist definition instead.