Google grants outsider Chrome-coding privileges

I guess that Google Chrome really is an open-source project.

Thus far, the Web browser has been written largely by Google programmers, though shortly after the software's public release, Google started accepting patches from outsiders. Now, though, an outsider has become an official insider.

The search giant has bestowed upon the first non-Google programmer the privilege of adding code to the project, a process called committing. The new commiter: Paweł Hajdan Jr., a computer science student at the University of Warsaw who's submitted his own patches to Chrome almost daily, Google programmer Evan Martin wrote in a blog post Friday.

"In his free time, he's managed to write a ton of high-quality code towards making Chromium work on non-Windows platforms," Martin said.

According to Google's guidelines, becoming a Chrome committer isn't easy.

"This privilege is granted with some expectation of responsibility: committers are people who care about Chromium and want to help the project meet its goals. A committer is not just someone who can make changes to SVN (the repository where Chrome's source code is held), but someone who has demonstrated his or her ability to collaborate with the team, get the most knowledgeable people to review code, contribute high-quality code, and follow through to fix issues," the guidelines say.

More specifically, someone vying for committer status must "contribute 10 to 20 nontrivial patches, and get at least three different people to review them," according to the guidelines. Then that person must be nominated.

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