Predictions
What’s next in open source
Technology today is critical in business, government, social development, and so much more—and open source is all too often at the forefront of what’s next.
In 2022 alone, governments convened meetings about open source investment, social development groups certified open source software to track carbon emissions, companies sponsored more and more key open source projects, and industry groups continued to make efforts to improve supply chain security in open source software.
In short, it’s been a busy year.
We turned to several experts at GitHub to understand what trends and areas matter most in the world of open source, and what to expect in the months and years ahead.
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Thank you to everyone who made every contribution this year possible.
Methodology
This report draws on anonymized user and product data taken from GitHub from October 1, 2021 through September 30, 2022.
For a complete survey methodology, please contact press@github.com.
Glossary
- 2022:
- A year in this report is the last 365 days from the last Octoverse release and ranges from 10/1/2021 to 9/30/2022.
- Developers:
- Developers are individual user accounts on GitHub.
- Public projects:
- Any project on GitHub that is publicly available for others to contribute to, fork, clone, or engage with.
- Open Source Projects and Communities:
- Open source projects are public repositories with an open source license.
- Open Source Licenses:
- One of 40 licenses recognized by GitHub and the Open Source Initiative.
- Location:
- Geographic information is based on the last known location of individual users and organization profiles. We only study anonymized and aggregated location data, and never look at location data beyond the geographic region and country.
- Organizations:
- Organization accounts represent groups of people on GitHub that can be paid or free and big or small.
- Projects and Repositories:
- We often use projects and repositories interchangeably, but recognize that larger projects can sometimes span multiple repositories.
