Open Source
The state of open source on GitHub
We’ve used GitHub from the inception of Datadog … and a lot of our engineers contribute to open source so there’s a sense of community there.
Emilio Escobar, Chief Information Security Officer // Datadog
From simple networking programs to repositories with 20,000+ contributors, open source projects are growing on GitHub—and getting contributed to and consumed by developers and companies alike.
The top open source projects
Developers came together to build and engage with a massive number of projects in 2022 from company-led projects like flutter/flutter to educational projects like ossu/computer-science.
Some of the top OSS projects are used in millions of other repositories, proprietary software, and even in governmental and nonprofit systems.
Top open source projects by contributors
Notably, the largest projects by contributor count are almost all commercially backed efforts with standouts including microsoft/vscode, flutter/flutter, and vercel/next.js.
One noticeable exception? The popular open source home automation project home-assistant/core, which saw significant growth over the past year.
The ReadME Project
The maintainer behind the Home Assistant project
Originally from the Netherlands and now based in California, Paulus Schoutsen open sourced a project named Home Assistant seven years ago—and it’s now one of the most popular projects on GitHub.
Top projects with the fastest-growing contributor counts
Engines, kits, and frameworks saw some of the highest year-over-year growth in overall contributors.
In particular, the home-assistant/core project grew quickly over the past year showing a growing interest among developers in home automation.
There was also a notable uptick in contributors to the access management project keycloak/keycloak, which is commonly used to enable single-sign on, log-in via a social media account, and two-factor authentication in mobile and desktop applications.
One interesting insight: The digital art generation engine HashLips/hashlips_art_engine and NFT tooling project metaplex-foundation/metaplex saw significant growth—and both have roots in the NFT (non fungible tokens) space, which rose and fell in popularity throughout 2022.
Open source projects with the most first-time contributors
Developers making their first-time contributions to open source projects on GitHub overwhelmingly favored larger, company-led repositories in 2022—and this includes developers inside and outside the companies behind those projects.
That underscores how businesses are using OSS to scale faster, gain greater visibility, and engage with a much larger pool of developers.
Contribute more than just code to open source
Since 2019, we’ve invested in GitHub Sponsors to help anyone financially support the developers behind open source projects—and that includes companies, which have sponsored a number of projects across GitHub.
