The ehcache community is large and very active. People come up with great ideas to solve problems they come up against and often contribute patches to ehcache. The Ehcache project has always encouraged contribution of patches.
If you are submitting a patch, please complete a Contributor Agreement. This ensures that we can accept the patch and make it available under our Apache 2 open source license. You can grab the agreement form and instructions on where to send it once completed from the Community Wiki Contributor Page: http://www.terracotta.org/confluence/display/devdocs/How+To+Become+A+Contributor
Finally if you have submitted a patch which has not yet been applied, we may be waiting for you to complete an agreement.