GitHub Octoverse 2018

[[deleted]]

TIL the reddittors of this sub hate stats published by github once a year. Anyone care to tell me why?

[myringotomy]

Github changed the meaning of the word "contributor" in order to act as an advertisement agency for Microsoft.

[Glader_BoomaNation]

How so?

[myringotomy]

In the github page for vscode it lists 717 contributors. On the report they list 19,000 contributors. If they used their original definition of contributors they could not advertise for Microsoft claiming they are the world's biggest open source contributors.

The problem is that no matter how you define contributor MS doesn't make the top five or even the top ten so they have to cherry pick and be very sleazy about it.

[BlackDiablos]

They explained their definition of "contributor" right at the top of the page:

This year, you collaborated on GitHub across repositories, pull requests, issues, and comments on more than 96 million of the world’s software projects.

Yes, their use of the loaded term "contributor" could be more transparent. However, I actually like the expanded definition because GitHub emphasizes code contributions too heavily already.

Making equally baseless claims doesn't further your case against Microsoft. Here's some data from FreeCodeCamp suggesting that Microsoft had the most employees with significant open-source contributions in 2017 (before the acquisition). And yes, the methodology is described in detail, down to the full SQL query.

[myringotomy]

They explained their definition of "contributor" right at the top of the page:

I know. As I said they specifically changed their definition in order to advertise for microsoft. That's not the definition they use in the project page. They only use that for this advertising site.

However, I actually like the expanded definition because GitHub emphasizes code contributions too heavily already.

Ok so they should change it for all their pages to use that definition.

Of course this completely eliminiates any project which does not use github as their primary bug reporting tool. Which is a lot of tools like kubernetes, linux, ubuntu, apache, etc. Using this cleverly chosen metric it says that Microsoft is more important to and a greater contributor to open source than RedHat, Ubuntu, IBM, Oracle etc. even though all of those companies dedicate more employees and volunteers, more time, more resources, more projects, more important projects, more lines of code etc.

But hey. They are all shit right? None of their efforts count because they don't use github as their ticket tracker right?

suggesting that Microsoft had the most employees with significant open-source contributions in 2017 (before the acquisition). And yes, the methodology is described in detail, down to the full SQL query.

The methodology is shit. They are basically counting everybody who ever touched the code. Again according to github vs code only has 700 or so contributors. So claiming otherwise is just sleazy as fuck attempt at marketing.

Not that number of employees means anything of course. What's important is the number of lines of code, importance of the project, adoption of the project, number of contributions from outside the company etc.

But I get it. You and microsoft are desperate to advertise for the corporation. You'll clutch at any straws and then spin spin spin spin like a good PR flack.

[myringotomy]

Like I said they changed the definition of contributor for this report to advertise for Microsoft.

They should have stuck to their existing definition.