The State of Open Source Is Strong, Says GitHub Report

By FOSSlife Team, 16 November, 2022

GitHub has released its annual report on the state of open source software, as seen through the lens of contributions and contributors on the popular Microsoft-owned software development website.

“When we released our first Octoverse report 10 years ago to celebrate 2.8 million people on GitHub, we couldn’t have predicted the impact open source would have on the world,” the report states. And, indeed, the open source ecosystem looks very different now.

Let’s look at a few of GitHub’s top findings for this year:

94 million developers are on GitHub (27% year-over-year growth)
20.5 million new developers joined GitHub in 2022
85.7 million new repositories (20% year-over-year)
413 million open source contributions in 2022

Growth Trends

More than 20.5 million new people joined GitHub in 2022. Outside the United States, the largest increases were seen in India, China, and Brazil.

“India’s population on our platform alone totaled 9.75 million people in the past year—and more than 2.5 million new people in India joined GitHub in 2022,” the report states. If this trajectory continues, GitHub predicts the number of users in India will match the number of U.S. users by 2025.

South America is also experiencing rapid growth in terms of developer numbers, with Argentina (41% increase), Brazil (39%), and Colombia (33%) seeing the largest percentage increases.

Top Languages

Almost 500 primary languages were used to build software on GitHub, says the report. “The changes in what languages developers are using underscore key shifts in how software is being built — and what kinds of software are being developed.”

In terms of usage, the top five languages are the same as last year:

JavaScript
Python
Java
TypeScript
C#

Elsewhere, PHP and C++ switched spots, with PHP dropping from sixth to seventh, and C++ now occupying sixth place.

The languages that saw the most growth, however, are:

HCL (56.1% year-over-year growth)
Rust (50.5%)
TypeScript (37.8%)
Lua (34.2%)
Go (28.3%)

Growth of the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), according to the report, was driven by popularity of the Terraform tool and infrastructure as code (IaC) practices to automate deployments. Interestingly, just outside the top five, shell use grew 27 percent over last year.

Top Projects

The largest projects, based on the number of contributors, are mainly Microsoft projects or other commercially backed efforts. A notable exception, says GitHub, is Home Assistant, an open source home automation project, which saw significant growth last year.

Top GitHub projects by number of contributors are: