GitHub's Annual Report Reveals This Year's Top Contributor: Microsoft (github.com)

GitHub saw more than 67 million pull requests this year -- more than a third of GitHub's "lifetime" total of 200 million pull requests since its launch in 2008. It now hosts 96 million repositories, and has over 31 million contributors -- including 8 million who just joined within the last 12 months.

These are among the facts released in GitHub's annual "State of the Octoverse" report -- a surprising number of which involve Microsoft.

• GitHub's top project this year, by contributor count, was Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (with 19,000 contributors), followed by Facebook's React Native (10,000), TensorFlow (9,300) and Angular CLI (8,800) -- as well as Angular (7,600) -- and the open source documentation for Microsoft Azure (7,800).

• Microsoft now has more employees contributing to open source projects than any other company or organization (7,700 employees), followed by Google (5,500), Red Hat (3,300), U.C. Berkeley (2,700), and Intel (2,200).

• The open source documentation for Microsoft Azure is GitHub's fastest-growing open source project, followed by PyTorch (an open source machine learning library for Python).

• Among the "Cool new open source projects" is an Electron app running Windows 95.

But more than 2.1 million organizations are now using GitHub (including public and private repositories) -- which is 40% more than last year -- and the report offers a fun glimpse into the minutiae of life in the coding community.

Read on for more details.

"Since we've launched security alerts, we've alerted you to more than 5 million vulnerabilities across the open source projects your teams depend on. And you've already resolved more than 800,000 of these," GitHub reports. In addition, "This year, more than 150 hackers helped us resolve issues in an average of 6 days," with a total of 213 bug bounty reports resolved. "Together, the engineers and researchers in our program earned more than $300,000 in bounties."

There's also some statistics on how contributors use GitHub:

• Contributors are most active -- creating issues, opening pull requests, or making comments -- between two and four in the afternoon.

• GitHub reports that its contributors are less active in private repositories on weekends, "And there's always one quiet day on GitHub, regardless of location: New Year's."

• GitHub's top trending topic was "hacktoberfest", followed by "pytorch".

• GitHub's top emoji is a yellow "thumbs-up" icon, which over the last year was used 3.5 million times. GitHub even reports which programming language communities were most likely to use the yellow thumbs-up icon -- Java, followed by TypeScript, Go, JavaScript, and Python. (The Ruby community, meanwhile, was the one most likely to use the red heart icon.)

And there's also statistics on where contributors are located.

• 80% of GitHub's users come from outside of the United States, with that percentage increasing year after year. But the U.S. still has the most contributors, followed by China, and India -- and the same three countries also had the most new signups this year.

• The countries with the next-most contributors were the U.K., Germany, Canada, and Brazil (which rose three ranks this year, from the #10 position to #7...)

• Overall, more open source projects have been created in Asia than any other part of the world.

"Developers from the Czech Republic are especially chatty in public and open source repositories," the report notes -- followed by Switzerland, Germany, the United States, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

Comments

I used my toothbrush more than anyone else.

[BrendaEM]

Microsoft was using a product they bought. Award given?

One metric I didn't see in the summary

[bobstreo]

the old reliable metric:

Lines of code.

Having thousands of "contributors" and pull requests don't really mean anything but pointless metrics. They seem more like metrics that can easily be gamed.

Important, but missing, qualifier

[93 Escort Wagon]

”Microsoft now has more employees contributing to [the] open source projects on GitHub (which they recently purchased) than any other company or organization (7,700 employees), followed by Google (5,500), Red Hat (3,300), U.C. Berkeley (2,700), and Intel (2,200).”

FTFY.

Given that Red Hat has well over 12000 employees, it’s apparent the original statement was inaccurately worded.

mod parent up

[themusicgod1]

This is exactly correct. There's plenty of us who left github and are never coming back. Obviously the microsoft devs will be represented in the numbers, but we won't.