Zephyr: Open Source Project Best Practices Over Time

In 2024, the Zephyr project hit a milestone by becoming one of the few open source projects with over 100,000 commits in it's main repo. Why are developers joining and contributing to it?

When the project launched in 2016, there was the commitment from the start apply known best practices to its development. While Zephyr is a different code base, a lot of the lessons learned from the Linux Kernel Community were applied to forming it's community. The project focused on incorporating security best practices as the were identified right from the start, and is now working towards formal safety certification.

This talk will go through some of the best practices that have been applied for developing open source projects, and illustrate the results of applying these best practices.