A vibrant and diverse community is one of the hallmarks of a successful open source project. In the years since the first commit was made, the Zephyr Project has been intentional about building a vendor-neutral space where any developer, whether from a large company, independent consultancy, hobbyist or student, can collaborate to build an innovative, fit for purpose RTOS. We are pleased to announce that the Zephyr Project has now passed an important community milestone. We have surpassed 300 unique contributors!
The community of developers building Zephyr Project is as diverse as the types of contributions they make. Currently, our community is made up of technologists working on the project in a professional capacity. Developers working for Platinum members Intel, Linaro, NXP, and Nordic Semiconductor represent a large portion of the community. However, over the last 12 months Zephyr Project has seen a rise in the number of developers making commits from Silver members like Oticon and Synopsys and contributors from universities, small firms and non-member organizations. Over the next year we anticipate the pace of committer community growth to continue to increase as new member organizations join and the user community grows. With that growth we fully expect Zephyr OS to continue driving innovation and collaboration in the IoT space.
Deciding to join an open source community as a committer is an important decision. In addition to choosing an open source RTOS based on features, security, safety and the number of supported boards and drivers, developers looking to invest their time in a project look at more than just the code. So why are people joining the Zephyr community?
Zephyr is a vendor-neutral initiative governed by a separate Technical Steering Committee and Governing Board. This means technical decisions and decisions about how contributions are assessed and included in the project are made transparently and with input from representatives from the community. This allows the project to incorporate diverse perspectives, quickly respond to the needs of the community and better keep pace with the ever changing IoT and embedded ecosystem.
On behalf of the entire team behind the Zephyr Project, we want to thank each and every contributor who has helped make this project one of the fastest growing RTOS’ in the market. If you are interested in getting involved in the Zephyr Project please see our Contributor Guide. You can get more insight into the contributor community on our GitHub page. Visit our roadmap to see what Zephyr developers are working on for the upcoming 1.13 release and beyond. Stay tuned to this blog for more community updates, events and announcements.
