You can also setup your own project using the sources, spec files and patches from another project and develop within this project.

#osc copypac SOURCEPRJ SOURCEPAC DESTPRJ

By default, Open Build Service will strip the maintainer info and now make it part of your own project. To clarify, when we speak of a project, it can mean just one package or a complete set of packages with their own build dependencies.

In case a user does not have commit permissions for a project, they can request maintainership permissions for this project. This makes sense if the user is already known to the project owners and they trust them as a maintainer. There is a way to do this via the request system of OBS, but only via osc so far:

# osc createrequest -a add_me maintainer PROJECT

Users who are new to a given project, either because they are new users with Open Build Service or packaging or do not have any deeper knowledge about a certain project will not have direct commit permissions. However, they can still create a copy of any package source and ask back to merge their changes. Open Build Service has support to make this easy.

Wiki reference: User comment page