Microsoft Has More Open Source Contributors On GitHub Than Facebook and Google (thenextweb.com) 118
An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Next Web: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has really embraced open source over the past couple of years. GitHub, a site that is home to a number of the web's biggest collaborative code projects, has counted more than 5.8 million active users on its platform over the past 12 months, and says that Microsoft has the most open source contributors. Microsoft has 16,419 contributors, beating out Facebook's 15,682 contributors, Docker's 14,059 contributors, and Google's 12,140 contributors. The Next Web reports: "Of course, this didn't happen overnight. In October 2014, it open sourced its .NET framework, which is the company's programming infrastructure for building and running apps and services -- a major move towards introducing more developers to its server-side stack. Since then, it's open sourced its Chakra JavaScript engine, Visual Studio's MSBuild compiling engine, the Computational Networks Toolkit for deep learning applications, its Xamarin tool for building cross-platform apps and most recently, PowerShell. It's also worth noting that the company's Visual Studio Code text editor made GitHub's list of repositories with the most contributors. You can check out these lists, as well as other data from GitHub's platform on this page." GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath said in an interview with Fortune, "The big .Net project has more people outside of Microsoft contributing to it than people who work at Microsoft."
Google is still #1 (Score:3, Informative)
They still are the company with the most open source contributions/contributors. They just have most of their projects like android on their own hosting to not overload github.
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No it's not.
Most large companies have their very own copy of github in-house. Most commonly these days it's on AWS or some other cloud offering that the company controls for their IT Projects.
Confirming. (Score:2)
Most large companies have their very own copy of github in-house. Most commonly these days it's on AWS or some other cloud offering that the company controls for their IT Projects.
I can confirm.
Though we aren't *companies*, most of the universities and research institutes here around (Switzerland) have their own in-house git repository.
Though in our case, a self-hosted copy of * Gitlab [gitlab.com]* is what is the most popular here around.
And most of the time it's hosted on the universty's/research institute's own server because of complex IP/publishing/secrecy considerations
And if we do it, I can clearly imagin that huge corporation could be doing it too.
And for the record, Google has announced
Re:Google is still #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it isn't. Believe it or not, people shared code before GitHub. They generally hosted it themselves, or used other popular sites like sourceforge. Claiming that one company has more due merely due to GitHub contributors is ridiculously incomplete to the point of uselessness.
GitHub is popular, but there's dozens of other places to host your code. Most developers don't use it.
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For a couple of decades, Microsoft hired bright coders (and a handful of dullards). That there are more Microsoft open source coders is no surprise. Coders code, and some are compensated for projects, and in other cases, do free/open work.
The where of a code repository is somewhat meaningless, so long as there's accessibility. Git is one place, others have flourished then largely disappeared.
Re:Google is still #1 (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know if they are number one. But that MS argument is phony.
For the longest time, google people were pushing to code.google.com. Also the kernel contributions do not go to github.
Also, claiming you have more contributors do not tell much. Did they only contribute one line?
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There's no mention if these people are contributing individually to open source projects on their own time. Most if not all devs I know and have known have their own repos for *something* personal.
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> For the longest time, google people were pushing to code.google.com. Also the kernel contributions do not go to github.
Indeed. Don't forget BerliOS.de which shut down in 2011. Apparently they had 4,700+ open source projects.
http://www.archiveteam.org/ind... [archiveteam.org]
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On their own hosting? You mean Google Code [google.com]?
Re:Google is still #1 (Score:5, Informative)
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Probably more to the fact they are trying to make Open Source software more compatible with their own products.
A lot of OSS software are designed with the Unix/Linux mindset. And ports to Windows are rather a last minute hack not really designed to use Windows features.
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Does Android make them #1 because of lines of code, or because of hours of compilation? Do you still need a machine with like 32GB of RAM and multiple TB of disk to compile Android?
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One thing about projects on GitHub is that this also implies accepting pull requests. I guess some projects might not do so as a matter of policy, but I've yet to see a Microsoft GitHub-hosted project that did not accept pull requests (subject to quality bars etc, of course).
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your link [google.com]
Re: Google would have more (Score:1)
It's called a contributor license agreement , and it's common in lots of open source projects not run by Google
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And ways to push azure thing, and ways to make .net actually popular...
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Contributors meaning people contributing to Microsoft projects rather than Microsoft people contributing to other people's projects.
And yet... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Aaand microsoft is an android patent troll.
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I was gonna say that. Shills try to claim MS are the good open source guys, where all they contribute to open source is so we rent Azure cloud stuff. Meanwhile, they're suing virtually all Android manufacturers, suing people for using FAT32 and countless other dick moves. You've quite mistaken if you think they're the good guys!
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Hearts and minds.
Think of it as a very friendly chat at a used car yard or with a local politician, cult member.
At the end of it your going to have to buy into something.
The first line of code is always free...
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You know if you guys spent more time developing code and less time developing conspiracy theories there might actually be a desktop Linux system worth using and maybe Microsoft would actually die.
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Obviously (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft is a software company. Facebook and Google are advertising companies. Who would you expect to have more Open Source software contributors?
Re: Obviously (Score:1)
The advertiser's because they not only want to know everything about you, they want you to give them everything you own.
.NET programmers have been waiting years (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft went overnight from just another big corporation to being an active participant in a community. They didn't half-ass it like their previous MS-PL things and they aren't just hosting a copy of their repo in public. They dove in head-first and use all the same 3rd party stuff everyone else does. Non-Microsoft devs are on equal footing with those from Microsoft -- if your code is good and your points valid, they are taken.
All of the new features in C# 7 were discussed by the public, with multiple revisions coming out driven by those talks. There's a huge corpus of features in flight, some with 3rd-party implementations, ready to be picked from for C# 8.
When .NET Core was announced I saw it as an opportunity to add the features I always wished it had, fix random bugs that I'd reported but had closed as "Wont Fix" because they were without enough benefit to their business customers, etc. -- my first pull request came in so fast they told me "err sorry we haven't figured out the process for adding APIs yet, hold on."
Re:.NET programmers have been waiting years (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been having a blast. I work at Microsoft on C#. But now that it's all open-source, I did things completely differently...
I had an idea for a new C# language feature (more efficient async, saves up to 90% allocation in some benchmarks). I discussed it first on github with the public. Then I forked the official C# repository into my personal github account, did all the coding live on livecoding.tv. Once it was finished I took it to the official C# Language Design Team, who approved it. And it'll be in C#7!
https://www.livecoding.tv/ljw1... [livecoding.tv]
So in other words, "GitHub is a Terrible Metric" (Score:3, Informative)
If you want an accurate measure of the number of open source contributors, don't limit yourself to github. Google opened sourced their own source code management system, Monorail. Many of there projects are hosted there such as Chromium and Android. There also huge contributors to LLVM/Clang, which uses SVN and of course the Linux kernel which is also not hosted on github.
So basically BS click bait article.
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If you want an accurate measure of the number of open source contributors, don't limit yourself to github.
But that isnt what they are doing nor what they are claiming to do, it couldn't be much clearer and is written right there in the article title.
So basically BS click bait article.
You just failed to read the title: Microsoft Has More Open Source Contributors On GitHub Than Facebook and Google. Which is the same title as the article which references Github metrics here [github.com].
"Sorry Github you can't post your metrics because somebody might report on it and despite them posting an accurate headline there are incompetent people out there like 'slacka'
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See Also: Climate Change, Anti-Vax, Evolution.
Somebody let Al Gore know about this (Score:2, Funny)
Since then, it's open sourced its Chakra JavaScript engine...
Someone let Al Gore know that they've released their Chakra - as open source software.
The Microsoft PR bots are working overtime (Score:2, Interesting)
This little turd blossom has shown up in every single new stream I have. So Microsoft is playing the "open source" game again? Does no one remember what happened the last time? What about embrace, extend, extinguish? Let me know when Microsoft does anything that isn't directly in their short term best interest. This PR stunt crap is just that. They've lost on the servers, they are losing browsers, they've lost on mobile, they lost on fitness trackers. No one really needs Windows anymore. The only product th
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You have a lot of history to learn. You can start on reading up on why the EU and US government took them to court. Then go read up about all the companies they ran into the ground and all the marketshare they stole by leveraging their cash cows. If you still can't work out EEE was much much more than about java and html standards then your mom should have embraced, extended and extinguished you as a kid.
Re: The Microsoft PR bots are working overtime (Score:1)
Embrace, extend and extinguish was used internally in Microsoft documents discovered in anti-trust lawsuits. Literally in the public record in 2001.
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> Java and HTML standards and last time I checked
> those were roaring successes!
The fact that Microsoft failed when they tried in those two cases does not absolve them of the responsibility and blame for their actions.
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No one really needs Windows anymore.
I do. Because I want an OS that I don't have to monkey around with. Also I like to play video games. Remember video games?
Truespace... (Score:3)
What does this mean for the newbie open sourcerer (Score:3, Insightful)
Say you're a millenial and actually use this github hoping to meet geekchix or fellow Big BangTheory fans or whatever.
In which group are you,
1) the embrace group
2) the extend group, or
3) the extinguish group?
Or did you sign up to be the Bad Example github user guy, always presented in front of the day's training session, to hang his head in shame and remorse, writing I will stop being a bad example 1000 times on the chalkboard somewhere in Redmond?
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Seriously?
"Embrace, extend, extinguish" isn't something that the Linux crowd just made up to slander Gates and Co. It's Microsoft's own internal policy, made public when documents were released during their trial and conviction. They are on record as considering open source to be equivalent to a cancer to be eradicated. They were found to be funneling money into SCO during their attack against Linux and IBM. And let's not forget the halloween documents. None of this is made-up conspiracy theorist nonse
Re: What does this mean for the newbie open source (Score:2)
Awesome! (Score:1)
With Win10 being OSS now it should be trivial to remove all the telemetry junk, it might even make the OS run faster! Right? RIGHT?
Fixing the projects (Score:2)
So, Google and Facebook require less external people to fix their code.
I think there's double counting somewhere... (Score:2)
FB's employee count was 14495 on June 30, 2016 (on their website). This seems to say that FB has 15682 contributors. So either FB hired like 5k+ employees in the past 2 months (hey, they have sales, which I doubt contributes to software), or there is significant double/triple/quadruple counting (or maybe past employees, but I doubt their turnover is that huge). I doubt any of this is FB's fault (since I don't think FB cares about these numbers), but the original article is pretty bad at reporting (at best),
quality over quantity (Score:2)
"Number of contributors" can be a misleading stat (Score:2)
I would applaud any serious attempt by any company to contribute to the Open Source community, both in terms of active contributors and also the open-sourcing of projects (particularly widely-used ones, such as the .Net Framework).
However, purely focussing on the number of contributors is potentially misleading for a number of reasons.
For example, a contributor who posts a single one-line update fixing a spelling mistake is still a contributor, and in the total that contributor carries as much weight as a c
Not Open Source License (Score:1)
Fool Me Twice... (Score:2)
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
This is not the first time Microsoft declared itself as open source. If they were dedicated to open source back then, they wouldn't be in a position to announce they open source; everyone would already know it. Put your money where your mouth is, Microsoft. Until they open-source Windows, Office, and Visual Studio, they are lying. And lairs are not to be trusted.
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liars are not to be trusted.
*Smacks forehead* So that's my problem!
Beware of the Greeks bearing gifts (Score:1)