Contribution to open source accelerates
According to the latest GitHub analysis by Aiven (an open-source data cloud company that organizations could use to build a modern data infrastructure), the three big supercomputers have significantly increased their commitment to open source in recent years, both in terms of the number of active contributors and the commitments of each organization.
In July 2022, Google's monthly commitments to GitHub increased by 21% year-over-year, and the number of active Google contributors on GitHub (5421) surpassed that of Microsoft (5258).
Aiven mentions that the total number of commits is calculated by analyzing GitHub contributor archive data by corporate email address. This measures the number of commits in a month and uses Google Big Query to analyze the public data on GitHub.
The Open Source Contributor Index measures the number of contributors and top programming languages, an open source project that tracks and measures open source activity on GitHub.
Heikki Nousiainen, CTO and co-founder of Aiven, comments: »
Our research shows that hyperscalers bring more resources to open source. This is great news. As a community, open source software needs this kind of commitment from big tech companies to ensure important projects are maintained and vulnerabilities like Log4Shell don't happen again. Furthermore, it is a better way to write clean, transparent and secure code.”
“An unexpected result of our research was to see Google surpass Microsoft in terms of the number of employees contributing to open source software. Google has been a champion of open source since its inception and recently announced its Assured Open Source Software service, reaffirming its commitment. «
Microsoft and Google remain the two leading companies contributing to free software. Amazon lags far behind, but is rapidly increasing its commitment to free software.
According to a new analysis by Aiven, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have never had so many employees involved in open source . Aiven's analysis of data from GitHub, the repository hosting service that is the de facto home of open source, found that the total number of active contributors to GitHub at Amazon, Microsoft, and Google increased by 300% in six years, from 2654 contributors in May 2016 to 10.549 in May 2022.
The research found that Google's monthly commits to GitHub increased 20% over the previous year, and Google's active contributors to GitHub (4643) surpassed Microsoft's contributions (4394) for the first time since records began in 2016. More than a third of the contributions of
Microsoft OSS contributions are in programming languages maintained by Microsoft. 38,8% of the languages they use are PowerShell or C#, both originally developed by Microsoft. For its part, Google prefers C++ and Java, and Amazon provides Python and Java.
«Google's takeover of Microsoft is especially surprising, since it is partly explained by the decrease, compared to the previous year, in Microsoft's commitment to open source projects. However, Microsoft's commitment to developer freedom and innovation continues, and the company is a major player in open source, even buying GitHub in 2018. This shift is testament to the fact that the market is increasingly looking to capitalize on open source software. «
Digging deeper, Aiven's research on commits (new software patch submissions to open source projects) revealed that the number of commits on GitHub from Microsoft and Google is still below the summer 2020 highs, even though the gap between both have been reduced.
Amazon still lags behind its hyperscale competitors, but now supports large open source projects like OpenSearch, a fork of ElasticSearch, and hosts a growing number of projects on its GitHub page.
Finally, if you are interested in learning more, you can find the details at the following link.