Open Source Hits a New Scale

When GitHub published its first Octoverse report in 2012, the platform counted 2.8 million developers, and open source was mostly seen as a way to run web servers. Projects like Docker and Kubernetes hadn't yet appeared in public. A decade later, the numbers tell a different story: more than 94 million developers now use GitHub, and open source underpins over 90% of the world's software.

The 2022 Octoverse report, released this year, tracks how that shift has changed both the developer community and the companies building on it. During 2022 alone, developers created 52 million new open source projects and made more than 413 million contributions to existing ones.

The report highlights three broad patterns in how open source is being adopted and advanced:

  1. Infrastructure as code is going mainstream. HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) was the fastest-growing language on GitHub in 2022, with Shell and Go also seeing notable gains. That points to wider adoption of infrastructure as code (IaC) practices, as more teams automate deployments rather than managing systems by hand.
  2. Commercial backing is becoming the norm for major projects. The largest open source projects on GitHub by contributor count are now almost all commercially backed. Businesses that once viewed open source with suspicion are now funding it—and building substantial communities around their own offerings. That translates into more money, more contributors, and more code released in the open.
  3. Newcomers are entering through large, company-supported projects. Roughly 50% of first-time contributors worked on commercially backed projects in 2022—and these aren't employees of the sponsoring companies. Projects like Next.js, React, and VS Code are effectively serving as entry points that draw new developers into the broader open source ecosystem.

Why Companies Are All In

Open source has moved from an experimental approach to a core part of how organizations ship software. A modern luxury car now contains more lines of code than a fighter jet, and no single company can produce that volume of software alone. That dependency helps explain why more than 30% of Fortune 100 companies now maintain open source program offices (OSPOs) to coordinate their strategies and contributions.

The ecosystem's growth also reflects broader adoption beyond traditional software companies. Open source is now a driver for everything from automotive engineering to game development, and it's been taken up by institutions like the United Nations and NASA.

Dig Into the Full Report

The Octoverse 2022 report includes more detail on these trends, the projects behind them, and the people and teams contributing. It's available at octoverse.github.com. A video breakdown of the key findings, recorded at GitHub Universe, is also available to watch online with free registration.