GitHub's Octovere Report Reveals 97% of Applications Use Open Source Software

Today, open source software underpins almost everything: 97% of applications leverage open source code, and 90% of companies apply or use it in some way.

GitHub alone had 413 million open source software (OSS) contributions in 2022.

"Open source software is the basis of 99% of the world's software," said Martin Woodward, vice president of developer relations at GitHub. “Open source has a number of benefits, from providing an environment for working quickly and flexibly to allowing developers around the world to collaborate. No single person or team can make the progress we can all make together. »

At this point, GitHub released its new Octovere 2022 report this week, which highlights many important statistics, insights, and developments within the open source community.

"As a home for all developers, we have the ability and responsibility to show how the open source ecosystem is changing and its impact on developers, communities, organizations, and businesses around the world," said said Woodward.

More open source commitment, support

The annual report was first published 10 years ago to celebrate 2.8 million people on GitHub; at the time, companies only used OSS to run web servers, and Kubernetes and Docker had yet to be released.

Now? There are over 94 million developers on GitHub and 90% of Fortune 100 companies use the platform.

The annual report analyzes data from millions of developers and repositories to explore open source software and determine key trends shaping software development, Woodward explained. This year's report, which focuses on the relationship between the OSS and the company, is based on anonymized user and product data extracted from GitHub between October 1, 2021 and September 30, 2022.

Some of the biggest OSS projects on GitHub in 2022 were commercially supported (including microsoft/vscode, flutter/flutter, vercel/next.js).

However, one of the most popular projects on GitHub is home-assistant/core (a home automation project), which has seen significant growth over the past year. Additionally, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of contributors to the keycloak/keycloak access management project, commonly used to enable single sign-on, social media account login, and two-factor authentication in mobile and desktop applications.

And the HashLips/hashlips_art_engine digital art generation engine and metaplex-foundation/metaplex NFT tooling project have also seen significant growth.

Organizations increasingly involved

Another key insight from the report: Organizations increasingly recognize how essential OSS is and are actively taking part in it.

GitHub reports that more companies are creating new OSS communities, and 30% of Fortune 100 companies have open source program offices (OSPOs) to coordinate OSS strategies. Additionally, half of new GitHub contributors are working on corporate-backed projects.

"More and more companies are participating in open source projects," Woodward said.

Some of the largest and most popular open source projects on GitHub are commercially supported, he pointed out. These companies, in turn, are creating new OSS communities, signaling their broader impact on the open source ecosystem.

"So that was super interesting and something that we will continue to see more of," Woodward said.

Ashley Wolf, who leads OSPO at GitHub, also said that "when more companies can adopt OSPOs, more people can engage and sustain open source. And that's...