Open source’s impact on the world’s 100 million developers

From Personal Projects to Global Communities

Open source has always been about more than code and licenses. At its core, it is a culture of participation where anyone can contribute to tools used across industries. While open source predates GitHub, the platform has become the primary gathering place for maintainers, contributors, and users to collaborate and grow projects together.

As GitHub recently surpassed 100 million developers, the definition of who counts as a developer has broadened well beyond those building software for tech companies. The stories of maintainers highlight how open source journeys evolve—from personal experiments to globally adopted infrastructure.

When Projects Outgrow Their Creators

Barbara Forbes, maintainer of PSSendGrid and a GitHub Star, saw her side project take off unexpectedly. While building solutions for her day job, she uploaded a wrapper for the SendGrid API to GitHub. What began as a small utility quickly gained traction:

I was doing my day-to-day job, making my own solutions for problems I encountered in my work. Suddenly, I discovered that people were adding stars to the repository and creating issues! One of the modules that I didn't expect at all, but it really took off was a wrapper about the SendGrid API. I thought maybe people can use this, so I'll put this online. Then I checked and it had 40K downloads!

The transition from personal project to community effort is a defining moment for many maintainers. Evan You, creator of Vue, describes how reaching critical mass transformed his project into something far larger than code:

When our user count reached a certain volume, Vue became a community. Suddenly, all these people were counting on me: contributors, educators, students. We had these core team members who were really passionate about it. Users building interesting stuff. It became bigger than I ever thought it could be.

Building Sustainable Governance

As projects mature, maintainers take on responsibilities beyond writing code. Creating governance structures, mentoring new leaders, and organizing events are all essential to keeping a project healthy. Lorena Mesa, who serves on the Board of the Python Software Foundation, emphasizes the collaborative nature of open source:

When people think of open source, they focus on the technical component. But it's also about the collaboration. It takes a village to do this thing.

Keeley Hammond, an Electron maintainer, points out that contributions come in many forms, not just pull requests. She found her own path into the project through non-technical work and encourages others to do the same:

We try hard to be welcoming and accessible to new contributors. But Electron can be an intimidating codebase to break into, even if you're an experienced developer. When I started trying to contribute back to the project, I volunteered for less technical work to start: helping to organize a maintainer summit, gathering release notes, and writing blog posts.

Funding the Work That Powers Everything

Many organizations now employ full-time teams to maintain the open source projects their businesses rely on. Meta maintains React, PickNik runs the Robot Operating System’s MoveIt project, and Quansight Labs contributes to NumPy, SciPy, and scikit-learn. Dmitry Vinnik from Meta’s open source program office describes the scale of the company's involvement:

Meta is all about scale–even Meta's open source projects. Every year we publish a year in review. In our last review, we have over 800 active open source repositories.

Individual maintainers also find sustainable funding through sponsorship. Kovid Goyal, maintainer of Calibre, was able to leave his regular job after setting up a donation button:

Calibre grew a lot more than I expected. Once I put up a donate button, I started getting more than pizza money… I sat with my wife and we decided I would try to make this go full time. It's been going well ever since!

A Shared Responsibility

Open source remains the foundation of modern technology, and its continuation depends on the people who contribute. Supporting projects—whether through code, documentation, funding, or community organizing—ensures the ecosystem stays healthy for the next generation of developers, artists, and organizers.

Interested in making your first contribution?
Check out How to Contribute to Open Source.

Interested in finding the next best project to contribute to?
Check out GitHub Explore.