The Octoverse report
Every year for the past 10 years, GitHub has released its Octoverse report, which takes a look at the state of open source. Late last year it released its 10th Octoverse .
The stats and three open source trends
The report starts off with some high level stats:
- 94 million developers on GitHub
- 90% of companies use open source*
- 90%+ of Fortune 100 companies use GitHub
- 413 million open source contributions in 2022
*The asterisk cites a 2021 report by .
The intro also highlights three trends:
Infrastructure-as-code is on the rise, e.g. the fastest growing language on GitHub was Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL)
Big tech is making an impact in open source, e.g. Microsoft (see the top open source projects and )
First-time contributors come in via company-sponsored projects
Other key takeaways
Other key takeaways (and interesting stats) cover the use of AI, global distribution of open source developers, and the most common languages on GitHub.
Open source and AI
The 2022 Octoverse report highlights some research into the effect GitHub Copilot (GitHub’s AI coding assistant) had on developer productivity and happiness. Stats in the full GitHub Copilot research show that when using GitHub Copilot:
- 88% of developers felt more productive
- 96% of developers said they were faster with repetitive tasks
- 74% of developers felt they could focus on more satisfying work
You can find more info and stats in the full GitHub Copilot research .
It will be interesting to see the 2023 report and how they take ChatGPT into consideration!
The global distribution of open source developers
A map on the global community of developers shows the geographical spread of GitHub developers. The highest concentration of open source developers can be found in the US, India and China. India had the largest growth in 2022 with 2.5 million new developers joining the platform, followed by China at 1.2 million developers.
Australia was 10th in developer growth for the Asia-Pacific region, with a 23% increase in new developers.
Most common programming languages
The most commonly used languages for 2022 were:
- JavaScript
- Python
- Java
- Typescript
- C#
- C++
- PHP
Open source predictions
The report also includes an open source predictions that links out to five themes:
Making open source more financially — making it easier for companies to contribute financially
Investing in open source supply chain — to protect the trust of developers, teams and organisations
How companies are investing in open — the rise of open source program offices
The profound social impact of open — how open source is being used to drive social good (also see our blog, the social impact of open source)
Evolving governmental policies around open — more open source in government and global policy
The last one is of particular interest to Salsa and our (mainly government) clients.
Salsa Digital’s take
The Octoverse report is an insightful snapshot into the open source world. In particular, the three trends identified in the latest report and the open source predictions provide a hint of what’s to come in 2023. As the use of AI in development increases this year (pretty much every developer is experimenting with ChatGPT) it will be interesting to see how this impacts the 2023 Octoverse report and if they’ll have a way to track AI use outside of GitHub Copilot.
With government using open source for more and more of its operational systems, how open source is developing, its uptake and popularity could inform how government chooses to adopt or continue using this technology. This could include factors such as budget for systems and training of internal teams.
Why Octoverse?
By the way, if you’re wondering why the report is called Octoverse, it comes from GitHub’s logo, Octocat. Find out more about the Octocat and its .