Google Chrome's Kimono Opened--A Little
by Sam Dean - Dec. 15, 2008Comments (4)- Related Blog Posts
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Stephen Shankland from CNet has an interesting item up today about the very first non-Google coder getting an invitation to add code directly to the open source browser project. In a blog post, Evan Martin, a software engineer at Google, nominates University of Warsaw computer science student Pawel Hajdan Jr. to move from "contributor"--submitting patches and the like to the Chrome team--to "committer," working directly on the browser's code. The nomination provides a glimpse of how high-profile open source projects truly treat openness.
Have you ever wondered how open projects like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome really are in terms of community development? Firefox has outside committers who help develop the browser, and now Google Chrome does too, but insiders move much of these projects' milestones along.
In the case of Pawel Hajdan Jr., the Chrome team says:
"In his free time he's managed to write a ton of high-quality code towards making Chromium work on non-Windows platforms. Those of us who have worked on committing his near-daily patches are relieved to see that he'll now be able to commit them himself!"
Google has published guidelines for becoming a Chromium committer here. Among other things, a potential committer has to contribute 10-20 useful patches and then get three different people to review them and express support.
Chromium is the open source core of Chrome, and, as we've written about before, variations of Chrome have already appeared. For example, there is a lightweight version of Chrome here, and Iron is a privacy-enhanced version of the browser.
Google should identify more committers such as Hajdan. The company would be well-served to deliver Chrome for the Mac and Linux as soon as possible, and I'm also looking for a streamlined portable version of the browser. Outside community help can make a big difference here.
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