GitHub's annual Octoverse report turned ten this year, and Martin Woodward, the company's VP of Developer Relations, used his Universe 2022 session to walk through a decade of platform data and what it says about open source.

A decade of growth

The first commit landed on GitHub in October 2007. Today the platform hosts over 94 million developers, a figure Woodward framed by noting it exceeds the combined populations of California, Texas and Florida, and sits roughly 20 million above the combined population of the UK and Ireland. Ten years ago, he added, the largest open source communities were in the US and Western Europe, with a sizable Asian presence; that map has since shifted substantially.

In 2022 alone, more than 20 million people joined GitHub, over 227 million pull requests were merged, over 31 million issues were closed, and more than 413 million contributions went to open source projects on the platform. Woodward also noted growth in contributions from every continent except Antarctica.

Where the developers are now

India. India now has nearly 10 million open source developers, with 2.5 million joining GitHub in the past year. Woodward traced the country's position to its universities and technical colleges, a jobs market initially driven by global systems integrators (whose investment in open source has also grown), and a newer wave of open source–powered startups — some built by participants in GitHub's grants program in India. At its current rate of growth, India could have more open source developers in 2025 than the US has today.

Latin America. Brazil passed 3 million developers. Argentina, Colombia and Chile are also climbing the rankings, with several countries growing by over a third in 2022.

Africa. Nigeria remains the region's engine, passing half a million developers with growth near 70%. Morocco has a large, well-established technical community but is being outstripped by Nigeria's pace; Kenya and Ghana are also growing rapidly, and Ethiopia grew roughly 60%, though from a smaller base.

Access remains uneven. Woodward pointed out that the same laptop costs considerably more in Nairobi than in New York, while median incomes differ widely, and that bandwidth in many of these countries is more expensive and less reliable, despite rapid improvements in cellular connectivity. He noted the appetite for growth is there regardless.

Antarctica's shrinking cohort

One continent bucked the trend. Woodward had long assumed the handful of Antarctic developers in the location data were a defect in GitHub's IP-to-location databases, and investigated after the population declined between 2021 and 2022. The developers were aboard a vessel in the Australian Antarctic Program, researching krill abundance in the seas around the continent. The published work, he explained, uses krill as a leading indicator of ocean health, since the species sits low in the food chain that supports large mammals and whales. The team analyzed raw data from the ship and shared it in real time with researchers in Australia, Japan and elsewhere — a workflow Woodward likened to DevOps. That scientific use of GitHub runs alongside the open science already on the platform, such as the James Webb Space Telescope's deep field imaging and its search for habitable planets.

Language shifts over ten years

Looking at languages used in public repositories, Woodward described the top of the chart as remarkably stable. JavaScript remains number one; Python has risen steadily over the decade and is now used across data science, space science and conference badge hacking; Java is still going strong; TypeScript was flat until around 2017 and now sits at number four, reflecting demand for a more strongly typed JavaScript on large teams. Beyond the top tier, the one notable reshuffle was C++ and PHP trading places last year. C# has grown across the years, tracing .NET's move from a closed system to an open source ecosystem.

Among the fastest-growing languages of 2022 by developer count, HCL took the top spot, with Shell — at 1.1 million developers, up nearly a third — also on the list, alongside Rust, Go, Lua and Kotlin. C remains behind Shell in the rankings, but because Shell grew rather than C shrinking.

Infrastructure as code moves into the open

That Shell and HCL growth is Woodward's first takeaway: operations work is arriving in open source. Terraform has driven HCL's rise, and the broader GitOps and infrastructure-as-code practices of high-performing DevOps teams are reaching mainstream audiences and being shared publicly. Kubernetes ranked among the fastest-growing communities on GitHub, competing cloud providers continue to chase those workloads, and pairing Terraform with GitHub Actions for CI/CD yields reliable deployments and infrastructure migrations. Woodward characterized operations teams as historically slower to put their changes under version control, unlike the JavaScript, Java and C# communities, which have long worked in the open.

Big tech as a force in open source

Second, and something Woodward admitted runs against the instincts of a lifelong open source advocate: large commercial software companies are behind some of the biggest projects and communities. Every large successful commercial software company now has an open source strategy.

Among the largest projects by contributor community, Home Assistant stands out as the counterexample — volunteer-led, without big tech sponsorship, though some maintainers founded Nabu Casa to sell hardware and services around it. Microsoft's communities rank highly, and Azure documentation placing among the largest projects would not have been a predictable outcome eight years ago. Meta's React investment spawned entire communities including Next.js and Material UI and startups such as Vercel, while its PyTorch grows quickly; Google's TensorFlow and Flutter are also prominent, Flutter as a cross-platform mobile application framework. NixOS gets a mention as a Linux-based community operating largely outside large-company influence, drawing interest from people Woodward knows in the configuration-as-code space.

What makes a working open source strategy

The lesson Woodward drew from these numbers is that communities thrive when a company is genuinely part of them: engineering teams moving out from behind the firewall and following the same contribution processes as everyone else. Companies doing this see community contributions more than tenfold the size of their own in-the-open engineering staff. Publishing over the wall is not participation. On balance, he argued, commercially backed projects are bringing new people into open source and teaching them to collaborate online, rather than harming it.

He also pointed to open source program offices (OSPOs), which advocate for responsible open source use inside a company and support investment in its dependencies. By GitHub's estimate, 30% of Fortune 100 companies now have one. Those wanting to learn more can look to the TODO Group and InnerSource Commons, communities where OSPO practitioners gather, or revisit the OSPO sessions from this year's conference. From Woodward's own experience, investing in open source changes a company's internal culture — more collaboration, fewer silos.

Conclusions

Woodward's three takeaways from this year's report: infrastructure-as-code communities are growing and bringing new practitioners into open source and sharing their practices; big tech's involvement is exposing more people to open source contribution for the first time; and the wider open source community continues to expand. The Octoverse report, first published in 2012, is available online, with the underlying data open so readers can draw their own conclusions.