Developer productivity and collaboration in open source improves in 2020: Study

Developer productivity and collaboration in open source improves in 2020, according to GitHub’s State of the Octoverse report. The report provides a detailed look at the developer and open source community in 2020. This year’s report takes a look at the remarkable achievements in a year like no other—diving into developer productivity, community and collaboration, and security in open source.

A few of the top-level highlights include:

• Living at work: Developer productivity in time of COVID
  • 35% more repositories created than last year: There is increased development work—both time spent and amount of work—across all time zones. It’s unclear if developers are taking advantage of flexible work schedules, or stretching the same amount of work over a longer period of time. However, in some cases work volume increases. Developers may be taking advantage of flexible schedules to manage their time and energy, which contributes to this sustained productivity.
  • 25% more contributions to open source projects: Developer work dropped on the weekends, while open source activity jumped. This could mean that open source is both a place to learn and create, and an important escape from work.
• Community and collaboration in 2020
  • 56M+ developers globally building on GitHub in 2020; targeting 100M developers by 2025. This includes more than 1.9B contributions added, 60M+ new repositories created, and 66% of active users based outside of North America.
  • Python and Typescript continue to grow in popularity: Top languages for 2020 include: Javascript, Python, Java, Typescript, C#, PHP, C++, C, Shell, Ruby, Objective-C
  • OSS for Good Projects saw explosive timely growth: This year, there is an influx in timely OSS projects with trending topics like covid-19, data workshop, angular9, bsa20, and vercel

• Developer productivity call out
  • INDIA: 46.3% in YOY growth, with a 103.1% in YOY total active students
  • By 2020, open source contributors from the United States have dropped to 22.7%, with strong contributors coming from China (9.76%) and India (5.2%). Others: Germany (6.43%), UK (4.51%), France (3.52%), Japan (2.49%), Australia (1.71%).

• Security in open source
  • Most vulnerabilities are from mistakes not malicious attacks: While malicious attacks are more likely to get attention in security circles, 
83% of the CVEs that GitHub sends alerts for are due to mistakes rather than malicious intent.
  • 94% of projects rely on open source components, with nearly 700 dependencies: Most projects on GitHub rely on open source software. The most frequent use of open source dependencies are in JavaScript (94%), Ruby (90%), and .NET (90%). A repository can have hundreds of dependencies, so when there’s a problem with security in the supply chain, a massive ripple effect can be seen.