Because Laravel's development and source control is done through GitHub, anyone is able to make contributions to it. Anyone can fix bugs, add features or improve the documentation.
After submitting proposed changes to the project, the Laravel team will review the changes and make the decision to commit them to Laravel's core.
Laravel's home on GitHub is at github.com/laravel. Laravel has several repositories. For basic contributions, the only repository you need to pay attention to is the laravel repository, located at github.com/laravel/laravel.
The laravel repository has multiple branches, each serving a specific purpose:
Once certain milestones have been reached and/or Taylor Otwell and the Laravel team is happy with the stability and additional features of the current development branch, the changes in the develop branch are pulled into the master branch, thus creating and releasing the newest stable version of Laravel for the world to use.
Further Reading