If you like to improve Genode in any way, you're more than welcome to contribute. A collection of ideas to enhance the current implementation can be found at the Challenges wiki page. If you prefer to improve the documentation, join in and use the wiki.

Genode is licensed to the community under the GNU GPL, but Genode Labs reserves the right to also distribute derivates to customers under closed-source licenses. Read more about our dual-licensing business model. Therefore, Genode Labs must ensure that the redistribution of your contributions under non-GPL licenses is legally allowed and ask you to either:

1. Fill out and sign the Genode Contributor's Agreement (GCA). The GCA enables Genode Labs to license Genode (including your contributions) under other licenses than the GPL. The signed GCA covers all your future contributions.

2. Alternatively, if you don't want to sign the GCA, you may submit your contributions under the MIT License. This license is liberal and permits Genode Labs to use your contributions in open and closed-source projects.

The major difference between both variants (and maybe an advantage of the GCA for you) is: The GCA permits only Genode Labs to relicense your contributions, while the MIT license frees your code for use by the public domain.

Development for Genode

The Genode source code is available via file releases and a public subversion repository (see the Download section for details). Genode Labs will update the sources (incorporating community contributions) and announce new Genode releases. Therefore, the SVN repository is not meant for active development but for convenient source-code update and tracking of changes between releases.

The advantage of this approach is that only code that meets Genode Labs's quality measures (tests, stability) becomes part of an official Genode release. The second (more legal) argument is that Genode Labs is obliged to ensure all contributions fit our dual-licensing model.

Submission of your contribution

As soon as you developed a patch you regard valuable to share with the community, submit it for incorporation. First, decide which of the above contribution licensing variants fits your needs. Then, accompany your patch with a proper description of its changes and send it to the genode-main mailing list. Depending on your chosen licensing variant, you may have to state that your source code is licensed under the MIT license.

Please, follow the developer discussion and possibly improve your patch. The integration into Genode may take some time for review and testing at Genode Labs.