Members of the open-source community can now contribute code to Fuchsia, an experimental operating system that Google LLC has been developing over the past four years.

Fuchsia first appeared with little fanfare in 2016 as a project on Google’s official GitHub page. The operating system is open-source and developers outside the search giant could freely access its code, but until today, they couldn’t contribute their own to the project. That is now changing. 

“Fuchsia is a long-term project to create a general-purpose, open-source operating system, and today we are expanding Fuchsia’s open-source model to welcome contributions from the public,” Wayne Piekarski, the developer advocate for the operating system, wrote in a blog post today on Google’s open-source software blog.

The move has several elements. To bring interested developers up to speed, Google is releasing a publicly accessible engineering roadmap that will outline its technical priorities for Fuchsia. For a more granular view of development efforts, Google has also published an issue tracker that shows the bug fixes and enhancements currently being worked on.

Along with the technical resources, Google today released a document outlining the project governance model that guides engineering efforts. The document provides developers with an overview of how to submit code contributions for consideration and what roles they can take on in the operating system’s development. 

“As an open-source effort, we welcome high-quality, well-tested contributions from all,” Piekarski wrote. “There is now a process to become a member to submit patches, or a committer with full write access.”

Google is no stranger to operating system development: Its Android platform powers the majority of the world’s phones and tablets. But whereas Android is based on the time-tested Linux kernel, Fuchsia is based on a much newer piece of software called Zircon. It’s a so-called microkernel that contains only the bare minimum amount of code necessary to perform essential operating system functions such as booting the host device and running applications.

It has been suggested over the years that Fuchsia might be a potential successor to Android. Last year, the search giant clarified that the platform in its current experimental form serves mainly as a testbed for developing new operating system features and technologies. However, it’s not out of the question that a future, more advanced version of Fuchsia may find its way into commercial devices: It was demonstrated as early as 2018 that the operating system could run on laptops.

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