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Comment by Illniyar | Hacker News Reader

How is that calculated?

I mean Microsoft only has 2561 members (https://github.com/orgs/Microsoft/people) , so it isn't how many microsoft members contribute to open source.

Is it how many contributors their open source projects have? nope, FontAwesome has maybe 100 contributors to all of it's 5 projects but it's listed as having 9000+ contributors.

From what I can gather it's mostly based on the number of people that forked one of their projects (with some padding, maybe by the number of contributors to forks of the project? I have no idea)

This doesn't seem like a metric that is more meaningful then just the number of stars a repository has.

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Microsoft also has:

https://github.com/azure

https://github.com/OfficeDev

https://github.com/mspnp

https://github.com/dotnet

https://github.com/aspnet

https://github.com/powershell

https://github.com/nuget - not sure this counts

plus probable another 100 i'm not aware of.

and many more but this is still not the entire list:

https://github.com/Xamarin

https://github.com/PowerBI

https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge

https://github.com/yammer

https://github.com/OneDrive

https://github.com/MicrosoftResearch

https://github.com/LIS

https://github.com/DynamicsCRM

https://github.com/MicrosoftDX

https://github.com/ms-iot

https://github.com/microsoft-mobile

https://github.com/thaliproject

https://github.com/OneGet

Please take a look here: https://microsoft.github.io

This is massive and as a die-hard Linux dude it fills me with great joy to see this. TypeScript, vscode, and dotnet/core are my bread and butter and I couldn't be happier.

I work in a .Net shop and witnessing everybody (slowly) move towards this middle-ground between .Net and Linux stacks is like watching history in the making.

I'm no huge fan of Microsoft but leading that list with Azure made me recall a nice experience I had with their devs.

One of their APIs was missing something I needed so I created an issue on Github. Not only did the devs respond, they thanked me profusely for the input and made the (rather significant) change in days. I don't know if it's true or not, but I felt like their only user whenever I interacted with them (their issue tracker was rather empty...)

I had a similar experience with MS employees for an issue on a third party SQL driver using it with Azure SQL... very courteous, professional, and was included on some internal email chains to keep me informed. It did take a couple days, but the effort was very nice to say the least.

It was an Azure team member that spotted the bug and worked with some of the MS SQL guys to resolve the issue.

I can't speak for the larger organization, but will say that the Azure and .Net Core teams have been incredibly open and responsive. And with a huge amount of their devdiv stuff in Github, it doesn't surprise me they'd be one of the largest corporate contributors on Github.

Historically I believe F# was the first project Microsoft open sourced. I'm not sure the current incarnation of the project reflects the entire history, but the language has active community contributors, with Don Syme of MSR acting as benevolent dictator. https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/graphs/contributor...

The WiX toolset is Microsoft's first open-sourced project: https://github.com/wixtoolset

omg, it's based on "the number of unique contributors (users who pushed code, opened or commented on an issue or PR)" (from https://octoverse.github.com/#open-source).

So if I open sourced a buggy project, and someone reported a bug by opening an issue, and then 100 other people commented on that issue, my project would have 101 contributors!

I guess that other _companies_ have even less than 2561 employees on GitHub

2561 members are the ones who made Microsoft org show up on their GitHub profile. By default, GitHub does not list your orgs on your profile. And many people are simply not aware of this, because your profile page looks different to you and others. You don't realize this until you visit your profile from incognito window or something.

The actual people count in https://github.com/orgs/Microsoft/people is twice as much. (I can see the actual number because I'm in the org.)

Oh, I didn't know that.

But it's still obvious that this is not the metric that was used.

One method that comes to mind would be checking commit authors' e-mail addresses. Someone with @microsoft.com e-mail would very likely be an employee of MSFT.

I doubt that explains FonttAwesome though.

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