VyOS is fully open-source and we encourage everyone to build images and report any build process issues. However, simply making code available is not enough.

We also keep the complete build toolchain available, and we strive to make it easy to use. You can build a VyOS image in just a few commands. There is no special maintainer toolchain we keep to ourselves: all image build tools are available to everyone interested.

Our issue tracker is available online. There is no private issue tracker: even issues reported by commercial users through the support portal are registered in the public tracker (except security issues before public disclosure of course).

Everyone is free to browse open tasks, test them, fix them, and make pull requests.

We do not have any contributor agreements that require you to transfer your copyrights to us. The copyright is shared between all contributors. This means no one can make a closed source fork of VyOS—not even its current maintainers.

VyOS is not just a product, but an open platform. It uses a layered architecture with unified and documented internal APIs.

Many major features were contributed by community members. Command definitions are written in a machine-verifiable XML format and malformed definitions fail the build. Our new code is in legacy-free Python3, and some core components are in OCaml.

Every part of the system is open to contributions.

We welcome all contributors. Even if you are not a programmer, there are many things to do: testing, documentation, evangelism and so on.

Since you are sharing your time and effort with us to make the project better, we are also happy to share our LTS release maintenance effort with you. Every active contributor can get access to prebuilt LTS images.

We also issue contributor badges through YourAcclaim that you can put on your CV. Already a contributor?