Gauging the future of open source, GitHub this week said it expects the number of software developers using its platform, currently 56 million, to grow to 100 million developers within five years.
In GitHub’s 2020 State of the Octoverse report, released December 2, the popular code sharing site also noted that more than 60 million repositories and more than 1.9 billion contributions were added in the past year. GitHub noted that much of the growth is happening outside of the United States, with 66% of active users now based outside of North America.
The percentage of open source contributors from the United States has dropped to 22.7%, down from 30.4% in 2015. Contributions are coming from a broader range of countries, the report indicates, with China accounting for 9.76% and India 5.2%. The report goes on to note:
As we look to the future of open source and reaching 100 million developers in 2025, we project open source contributions from the United States dropping to and stabilizing at 16.4%, with strong contributions from China (13.3%) and India (7.9%), and growth in South America and Africa, namely Brazil (3%) and Nigeria (1.5%).”
All told, 34% of GitHub users were in North America during 2020, down 2% from last year, while 30.7% were in Asia (up 1.1%) and 26.8% were in Europe (up 0.1%).
Growth on the site goes beyond software developers, with educators in particular joining in increasing numbers. Other new participants have come from the data and science spaces. The report covered communities, security, and productivity.
Other findings in the 2020 State of the Octoverse report:
- The top 10 languages in GitHub were, in the following order: JavaScript, Python, Java, TypeScript, C#, PHP, C++, C, Shell, and Ruby. Languages were ranked based on the number of unique contributors to public and private repositories tagged with the language. Moreover, according to Rubyroid Labs, frameworks like Ruby on Rails for creating server-side web applications will also gain enormous popularity.
- 5,646 repositories were created related to Covid-19.
- 17 percent of vulnerabilities were explicitly malicious, with the remaining 83 percent the result of mistakes.
- Active repositories with a supported package ecosystem have a 59 percent chance of getting a security alert in the next 12 months.
- Security vulnerabilities often go undetected for more than four years before being disclosed. Once identified, the package maintainer and security community generally release a fix in about four weeks.
