Australia is 12th largest open source user outside US

Australia is the 12th largest user of open source software outside the US, according to GitHub’s 2019 State of the Octoverse report, as measured by clones and forks of open source software on the site.

China was overwhelmingly the largest open source region outside of the US, followed by India, Germany, the UK, Japan, Canada, France, Russia, Brazil and Hong Kong.

Rounding out the top 20, the Netherlands beat Australia to 11th place. After Australia came South Korea, Spain, Ukraine, Poland, Singapore, Indonesia, Taiwan and Vietnam.

This year, 80% of contributors to public and private repositories came from outside the US.

The report also found that Asia Pacific’s contributor community has surpassed those in Europe and North America in terms of annual growth.

“This indicates a substantial shift in APAC from being a consumer to increasingly becoming a contributor to open source,” GitHub VP for APAC Sam Hunt commented.

Hong Kong was the fastest growing region globally by percentage growth of contributors (101%), followed by Singapore (77%), Japan (60%), South Korea (46%) and the Netherlands (37%).

Globally, 1.3 million first-time contributors joined the open source community this year with their first contribution to an open source project. Meanwhile, over 350,000 people made a combined 5 million plus contributions to the top 1000 open source projects this year.

Python outranked Java as the second most popular language on GitHub by repository contributors, but Javascript remained the top language.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Marcel