In his post over at the Google blog, Reza Behforooz, a Software Engineer at Google states how how easy it was for him to contribute to the GMail code base even though he doesn't work on the GMail team:

In my first month at Google, I complained to a friend on the Gmail team about a couple of small things that I disliked about Gmail. I expected him to point me to the bug database. But he told me to fix it myself, pointing me to a document on how to bring up the Gmail development environment on my workstation. The next day my code was reviewed by Gmail engineers, and then I submitted it. A week later, my change was live. I was amazed by the freedom to work across teams, the ability to check in code to another project, the trust in engineers to work on the right thing, and the excitement and speed of getting things done for our users. Engineers across our offices (and across projects) have access to the same code; I didn't have to ask for anyone's permission to work on this.

If this post came out of a small software company, I wouldn't be surprised at all, but coming out of Google, one of the hottest software companies in the world, it's pretty cool. The author goes on to mention his work in other software projects at Google and it's worth a read. Check out the whole post at "Crossing team and global boundaries"

(Via Google Blog.)