Octoverse 2022
The state of open source software
An exploration of open source software including its impact on the world and companies, plus key trends shaping software development.
You can’t develop software anymore these days without doing open source.
Wolfgang Gehring, FOSS Ambassador // Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation
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.
In 2012, most businesses were only using open source software (OSS) to run their web servers—and even as Red Hat achieved a $1 billion dollar valuation, other critical, big-name projects, such as Kubernetes and Docker, hadn’t yet been released.
Today, we live in a very different world.
- 94M developers are on GitHub
- 90% of companies use open source*
- 90%+ of Fortune 100 companies use GitHub
- 413M open source contributions in 2022
But what impact is open source really having on the world and how is it changing businesses?
In this year’s report, we will answer this question by exploring the scale and growth of software development across GitHub, and how people, communities, organizations, and companies collaborate and invest in open source software.
We uncover three big trends to watch:
Infrastructure as code picks up.
Developers used the Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL), Shell, and Go programming languages heavily in 2022, which indicates that infrastructure as code (IaC) practices are increasingly being adopted across projects on GitHub—including open source projects.
It also points to how operations communities are starting to make their presence felt in the world of open source, which has historically been far more developer centric.
HCL is the fastest growing language on GitHub
Big tech builds big open source communities.
Some of the biggest open source projects on GitHub in 2022 were commercially backed. This shows that investments are being made in open source that reflect its importance.
Those investments are also fueling a feedback loop: Companies are creating new OSS communities, which is compelling other organizations to start open source program offices (OSPO) to coordinate OSS strategies—and that is encouraging more people to contribute to open source. By our estimation, more than 30% of Fortune 100 companies now have OSPOs—and we predict this number will increase.*
30% of Fortune 100 companies have OSPOs
First-time OSS contributors favor commercially backed projects.
And it’s primarily among developers who do not belong to a commercially backed project organization. This underscores the importance of commercially backed open source projects in growing the broader ecosystem and brand recognition these projects carry. It also points to the investment companies have made in open source over the past decade.
From Flutter to Next.JS and React to VS Code, company-led open source projects have become an integral part of the developer ecosystem on GitHub.
50% of first-time contributors work on commercially backed projects
*This number was derived by GitHub open source program office (OSPO), which spoke to Fortune 100 companies and mined publicly available data to determine this figure.
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