Yep. This attitude isn't dead, assuming you approach the developer via the right/preferred venue, and are polite, and they are still actively maintaining the project. And it really helps if you give a thorough bug report!
I recently submitted a bug report to a fairly niche OSS package that I use, and within a few hours the author replied (on GitHub) something like "oh wow, yeah that's an edge case but I definitely want to fix it, can you send me the test data you used..." and once I gave him the test data, he had it fixed in two hours and now anybody who grabs the source won't have to deal with that bug.
It was great, and even though I didn't do anything except write up a bug ticket properly (the same way I'd expect anyone on my team at work to do it), the software is a little better now.
I recently submitted a bug report to a fairly niche OSS package that I use, and within a few hours the author replied (on GitHub) something like "oh wow, yeah that's an edge case but I definitely want to fix it, can you send me the test data you used..." and once I gave him the test data, he had it fixed in two hours and now anybody who grabs the source won't have to deal with that bug.
It was great, and even though I didn't do anything except write up a bug ticket properly (the same way I'd expect anyone on my team at work to do it), the software is a little better now.