Show HN: Which Countries Have the Most Open-Source Contribution?

6 points

5 years ago

The last two weeks of Console [1] I interviewed people who are not from the U.S. about their open-source projects. This got me thinking, are people outside the U.S. more prone to contribute to open-source than U.S. developers? So, I went looking by pulling in the location data for 500,000 publicly available repos to answer this question.

Why 500,000? Well, GitHub rate limits their API to roughly 1 request per second [2], and I didn't want to wait a year to write about my findings, or abuse their API. Anyway, here are the results:

None: 328, US: 232, Other: 38, United Kingdom: 29, Germany: 25, Canada: 17, Australia: 15, Switzerland: 9, Netherlands: 8, France: 8, Japan: 6, Romania: 5, Sweden: 5, Finland: 5, New Zealand: 4, Spain: 4, Russia: 3, Czech Republic: 3, Slovenia: 2, Bulgaria: 2, China: 2, Norway: 2, Argentina: 1, Singapore: 1, Hong Kong: 1, India: 1, Chile: 1, Poland: 1

Since the GitHub location is free-form, Other was used to capture things like "Everywhere", or "The Internet".

You might be thinking, "gee, this seems low", and this is because not only did I only look at 500,000 repos, but, I also only took repos with >1K stars, as I considered that a good heuristic for what I would consider a "substantial" contribution.

Anyway, there are obvious flaws with this approach (for example, are US repos more likely to be starred than others?), but it was enough to sate my curiosity and figured I'd pass it along to others in case they were also interested.

[1] https://console.substack.com/

[2] https://twitter.com/sjkelleyjr/status/1357523698039676928

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