Expanding Fuchsia's open source model

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.

Fuchsia is designed to prioritize security, updatability, and performance, and is currently under active development by the Fuchsia team. We have been developing Fuchsia in the open, in our git repository for the last four years. You can browse the repository history at https://fuchsia.googlesource.com to see how Fuchsia has evolved over time. We are laying this foundation from the kernel up to make it easier to create long-lasting, secure products and experiences.

Starting today, we are expanding Fuchsia's open source model to make it easier for the public to engage with the project. We have created new public mailing lists for project discussions, added a governance model to clarify how strategic decisions are made, and opened up the issue tracker for public contributors to see what’s being worked on. As an open source effort, we welcome high-quality, well-tested contributions from all. There is now a process to become a member to submit patches, or a committer with full write access.

In addition, we are also publishing a technical roadmap for Fuchsia to provide better insights for project direction and priorities. Some of the highlights of the roadmap are working on a driver framework for updating the kernel independently of the drivers, improving file systems for performance, and expanding the input pipeline for accessibility.

Fuchsia is an open source project that is inclusive by design, from the architecture of the platform itself, to the open source community that we’re building. The project is still evolving rapidly, but the underlying principles and values of the system have remained relatively constant throughout the project. More information about the core architectural principles are available in the documentation: secure, updatable, inclusive, and pragmatic.

Fuchsia is not ready for general product development or as a development target, but you can clone, compile, and contribute to it. It has support for a limited set of x64-based hardware, and you can also test it with Fuchsia’s emulator. You can download and build the source code by following the getting started guide.

Fuchsia emulator startup with fx emu

If you would like to learn more about Fuchsia, join our mailing lists and browse the documentation at fuchsia.dev. You can now be part of the project and help build the future of this operating system. We are looking forward to receiving contributions from the community as we grow Fuchsia together.

By Wayne Piekarski, Developer Advocate for Fuchsia