Bach Seat

 Matt Asay at Infoworld recently pointed out some interesting data on who really contributes to open source. Wikipedia, the most well-known open-source project, defines open-source software as software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Open-source code can evolve through community cooperation. These communities include individual programmers as well as large companies.

Adobe developer Fil Maj used the GitHub REST API to pull public profile information from GitHub users. The REST API is a low-bandwidth protocol used on the internet that allows two software programs to communicate with each other. Using the API, Mr. Maj collected the company field from all 2,060,011 GitHub user profiles who were active in 2017 (“active” meaning ten or more commits to public projects). Using that data, Mr. Maj was able to pull the total number of corporate contributors to GitHub, with results that might surprise you.

Here are the ranking of GitHub contributors, with their total number of employees actively contributing to open source projects on GitHub:

The author points out, this is not a perfect measure, but it is a much richer, more accurate data set for figuring out total contributors for any company. Even with that caveat in mind, we end up with many more corporate open source contributors than previous data suggested.

Microsoft’s contributions to open source

The new data shows Microsoft (MSFT) is the number 1 open source contributor. Redmond has twice the number of contributors compared to its next nearest competitor. Remember Steve Ballmer‘s developers! developers! developers! meltdown?  For those of us that were around when Mr. Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO called open source as a “cancer” and “anti-American,” this is a remarkable change of heart for MSFT.

Red Hat

Red Hat (RHT) Mr. Maj’s data puts the open source leader among the top contributors. Red Hat has dramatically fewer engineers on its payroll than Google (GOOG) or Microsoft. As such, it’s doubly impressive that Red Hat would place so highly. Pretty much every engineer in the company works on open-source projects.

Amazon

Amazon (AMZN) Often considered an open source ne’er-do-well, Amazon comes in at No. 6 in the rankings. AMZN has nearly 900 open source contributors on staff. The article points out that Amazon has perhaps not publicly led the open source effort in the same way as Google and Microsoft have, but it remains a strong contributor to the projects that feed its developer community.

China is a net consumer of open source

Chinese companies like Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba, which have long been perceived to be net consumers of open source, actually contribute quite a bit according to the new data.

Legacy firms

Legacy firms like Intel (INTC), Oracle (ORCL), Adobe (ADBE), and Cisco (CSCO) rank among the top 30 open source contributors reports InfoWorld.

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Color me suspicious, but have these firms really embraced open source. Have they just adapted their business model to usurp elements of open source to lay their proprietary code on top of it? This saves them the bother of writing new code and yet they can charge proprietary costs for software where they have reduced their development costs.

After all, numbers don’t lie. Stats say that in 2014, half of the companies said they use open source in their product. Just one year later, the number grew to 78%. Consequently, as long as open source continues to enjoy its place in the sun, we should expect the Microsoft-open source bromance to continue.

Related article

• Tracking the explosive growth of open-source software (TechCrunch)

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.