Most of the Google projects that we take for granted, that we use and appreciate nevertheless the most as we speak are labeled open source. We really think that all the cool things we have to say about Chrome OS, Chromium, AngularJs, Fucsia OS or Google Web Tool Kit just to name a few, were made possible also thanks to the hard work and sweat of countless contributors outside Google Inc. Today I would like to share with our readers a discovery I’ve made while performing my daily surf on the Chromium Gerrit website, a discovery that hopefully represents a sign of future collaboration between two large companies, Google and Facebook, that aims to further develop the Chrome operating system .

Without any other descriptions here is the mention I found in the Commit log:

“We are unblocking contributors from @fb.com and @oculus.com to contribute to Chromium. Our primary contributor group is still specified in our Facebook CLA group and should be consulted before allowing any contributions.”

After a little bit of more digging around, I also took a look at the Authors file. This is where I found the existence of several contributors listed with their personal email accounts as well as various companies that were listed with a wild card. When it comes to Google this is how an entry looks like: “Google Inc. <@google.com>”. Other companies (not the complete list) that are allowed in are Amazon (Amazon, Inc <@amazon.com>), St Microelectronics (ST Microelectronics <@st.com>), Facebook (Facebook, Inc. <@fb.com>) and again Facebook Inc with Oculus (Facebook, Inc. <*@oculus.com>).

In short terms it seems that Google is unblocking contributors from the Facebook organization. Anyone that posses a @fb.com or @oculus.com email address is allowed to contribute to the Chromium project. Although I do not completely know or understand at this point what this is all about and what section of Chromium will get updated by Facebook programmers in the future, this is clearly good news as we really think that crowd intelligence always translates into progress.

The other interesting fact is that contributors with @oculus email addresses are also allowed. For those of you who do not know, Oculus VR a Facebook parented company specialises in virtual reality hardware as well as software products. We are keen to see where this collaboration goes. Virtual reality and Chromebooks? This really sounds interesting and I have a strong feeling that really cool features are hot in the works already.

What do you think about this new collaboration between Facebook and Google? We would really love your input regarding this matter using the comment section below.