Microsoft Has More Open Source Contributors On GitHub Than Facebook and Google (thenextweb.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Next Web: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has really embraced open source over the past couple of years. GitHub, a site that is home to a number of the web's biggest collaborative code projects, has counted more than 5.8 million active users on its platform over the past 12 months, and says that Microsoft has the most open source contributors. Microsoft has 16,419 contributors, beating out Facebook's 15,682 contributors, Docker's 14,059 contributors, and Google's 12,140 contributors. The Next Web reports: "Of course, this didn't happen overnight. In October 2014, it open sourced its .NET framework, which is the company's programming infrastructure for building and running apps and services -- a major move towards introducing more developers to its server-side stack. Since then, it's open sourced its Chakra JavaScript engine, Visual Studio's MSBuild compiling engine, the Computational Networks Toolkit for deep learning applications, its Xamarin tool for building cross-platform apps and most recently, PowerShell. It's also worth noting that the company's Visual Studio Code text editor made GitHub's list of repositories with the most contributors. You can check out these lists, as well as other data from GitHub's platform on this page." GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath said in an interview with Fortune, "The big .Net project has more people outside of Microsoft contributing to it than people who work at Microsoft."

Comments

Google is still #1

[NotInHere]

They still are the company with the most open source contributions/contributors. They just have most of their projects like android on their own hosting to not overload github.

Re:Google is still #1

[godrik]

I don't know if they are number one. But that MS argument is phony.

For the longest time, google people were pushing to code.google.com. Also the kernel contributions do not go to github.

Also, claiming you have more contributors do not tell much. Did they only contribute one line?

Re:Google is still #1

[jrumney]

code.google.com was Google's hosting platform for other people's code. Their own code is hosted at googlesource.com, which is still active.

Re:Google would have more

[Anonymous Coward]

your link

.NET programmers have been waiting years

[PhrostyMcByte]

Microsoft went overnight from just another big corporation to being an active participant in a community. They didn't half-ass it like their previous MS-PL things and they aren't just hosting a copy of their repo in public. They dove in head-first and use all the same 3rd party stuff everyone else does. Non-Microsoft devs are on equal footing with those from Microsoft -- if your code is good and your points valid, they are taken.

All of the new features in C# 7 were discussed by the public, with multiple revisions coming out driven by those talks. There's a huge corpus of features in flight, some with 3rd-party implementations, ready to be picked from for C# 8.

When .NET Core was announced I saw it as an opportunity to add the features I always wished it had, fix random bugs that I'd reported but had closed as "Wont Fix" because they were without enough benefit to their business customers, etc. -- my first pull request came in so fast they told me "err sorry we haven't figured out the process for adding APIs yet, hold on."

So in other words, "GitHub is a Terrible Metric"

[slacka]

If you want an accurate measure of the number of open source contributors, don't limit yourself to github. Google opened sourced their own source code management system, Monorail. Many of there projects are hosted there such as Chromium and Android. There also huge contributors to LLVM/Clang, which uses SVN and of course the Linux kernel which is also not hosted on github.

So basically BS click bait article.

Re:And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Aaand microsoft is an android patent troll.