State of the Octoverse | Hacker News Reader

State of the Octoverse

octoverse.github.com

74 pointskeyle27 comments

Couple of interesting snippets:

Apple languages don’t reach the top-10 of languages used on GitHub. While this is likely impacted by the Objective-C/Swift split, it still shows how niche development for that platform is.

The rise of China in Open Source contributions, along with GitHub’s estimate that they’ll be the biggest contributing country by 2030.

I wouldn't necessarily call their platform a niche - but rather one that doesn't foster a lot of open-source contributions. I've always felt like development on Apple's platforms, even when wildly successful, is often a close-sourced and proprietary endeavor. It doesn't surprise me much that there isn't a big footprint of their languages on GitHub.

Yeah, I think there's more of a culture of paid (and therefore mostly closed source apps) on Apple platforms. Whereas anything cross platform is _not_ using Apple languages for the bulk of their code base, and Linux focused/exclusive apps are going to be over represented among open source because people who value open source are more likely to use an open source OS

> Apple languages don’t reach the top-10 of languages used on GitHub. While this is likely impacted by the Objective-C/Swift split, it still shows how niche development for that platform is.

Michelin 3-star restaurants don't reach the top used in world either.

I think a more apt analogy would be the 'soup nazi' and your soup can only be eaten in special, overpriced 'soup nazi' bowls.

> Michelin 3-star restaurants don't reach the top used in world either.

On the other hand, Michelin 3-star restaurants will typically give you cutlery along with your dinner, instead of telling you that you've got a drawer full of cutlery at home anyway. I'm not at all convinced this is the right analogy ;-).

The more likely reason is the one Macha mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25632710 . Apple's environment has a tradition of paid, closed-source development, and any cross-platform tools that also support macOS or iOS are unlikely to be built with Apple's macOS/iOS-only tools.

I believe the App Store policies are also incompatible with GPL, which further hinders open-source contributions from the Apple community.

nope, there are LGPL & GPL software on the app store and have been for quite some time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open-source_i...

The issue that prevented GPL back in 2010 was having to pay a fee to be able to upload new code to your own device, which has not been the case for 4/5 years now

Do you have a source for that? AFAIK all of the GPL'd apps in that list don't have GPL dependencies made by other people, so they're free to release the code under the GPL and distribute it on the App Store without following those terms. See Signal's 2016 post about it: https://signal.org/blog/license-update/

> shows how niche development for that platform

Alternatively: GitHub is still, despite belief to the contrary on places like HN, not synonymous with open source, let alone the entire world of software development. Each is a (limited) projection of that world. When you speak of them together, you are referring to two things, each belonging to a distinctly identifiable milieu. What you're observing is that the overlap between them is small.

If GitHub isn't synonymous with open source, what is?

not everything needs a synonym

Conceptually sure, but in practice is there actually a place where open source developers for apple products gather?

On a related note, do you guys know of other, lesser known, websites where specific niches of developers hang out? I mostly stick to github and rarely I'll go to sourceforge and gitlab but I haven't noticed patterns of specialties in their users. In the past I knew some semi-private German communities for reverse engineering but recently (2010+) it seems everything is getting more and more centralized and you can't find those kind of places anymore. I'd love to find some small communities of passionate people, not yet overrun by the mainstream crowd.

The top starred repo (according to query: https://gh.clickhouse.tech/explorer/#counting-stars) by stars is:

https://gh.clickhouse.tech/explorer/#counting-stars

Which is a 'protest' against 996 work schedule.

That's notable because I wouldn't have thought of GitHub as being a conduit for Chinese labour concerns before 2020.

Secondarily: TS has shot up the ranks, arguably a flavour of JS (already #1), together making them overwhelmingly the top dog.

Python now #2.

It would be interesting to see the types of information repo'd there by language, if anyone has resources on that please feel free to share.

We roughly know what people are doing in JS and C++ ... but in Python? What exactly is happening? We can only speculate. Is it Django? Devop scripts? Data? Education? AI?

996.icu was actually started in March 2019. (Earliest HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19498179 )

Python has seen enormous growth in data analysis and machine learning, thanks in part to the success of Jupyter notebooks.

Personally, I'd love to see these reports include annual data on the number/percentage of repositories with an open source license, and a breakdown of which licenses are most common. There was a post to that effect on the Github blog in 2015 [1], but it looks like it was a one-time deal. I think it would fit well into the Community Report data, and provide a pretty useful view into the actual state of free and open-source licensing.

[1] https://github.blog/2015-03-09-open-source-license-usage-on-...

You can search repos by license and see the counts. Two of my faves:

6M MIT: https://github.com/search?q=license%3Amit&type=Repositories&...

164K Unlicense: https://github.com/search?q=license%3Aunlicense&type=Reposit...

They also have search by license "family".

Also take a look at the more technical overview of the Octoverse: https://gh.clickhouse.tech/explorer/

It is like interactive notebook when you can edit and run your own queries on the metadata from GitHub.

This is fantastic! Thanks.

These should not be PDF files. It's 2021 - people read stuff on their phones. PDFs are rubbish on phones.

If you're going to distribute reports like this as PDFs you should have a well designed, responsive HTML version of the content as well.

I'm surprised by this because I usually see GitHub as a superb example of a web native company. This isn't web native at all.

The HTML page is very well designed and full of content. It seems like the primary content is in the HTML.

The content in the PDFs I think was secondary.

The PDFs have 110 pages total, so there's a ton of extra information in there. They're pretty, but there's no reason at all for them not to be HTML - if they were HTML (with linkable headings) I'd be able to link people to interesting insights from them, for example.

I would like a better format, but I like to print things, which PDF is still better than HTML at, AFAIK.

Right - that's the reason to offer both.

Yep, Typescript shot up. Expected that.

This is actually great. They focused on metrics that actually affect us all in the software dev space, and they didn’t pander by focusing on useless traits like a person’s gender and/or skin color. Progress!

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