Developers can create a branch of the official factory package, use the build service to create a version and hand in the results to the package's official maintainer. If the maintainer does not have time to consider the package, it does not become obsolete, but is referenced by future builds.

"This is the first time that external developers have been able to collaborate with us on the distribution by sending package changes to maintainers", says Suse employee Klaas Freitag, and Build Service architect, explaining the changes. To help support communications in this collaborative environment, the build service also has new submission and notification functions.

The updated Build Service runs on the build.opensuse.org website. The GPL-licensed source code is available from Novell Forge. Binary packages for various Suse versions are also available.