Developers, educators, data specialists … GitHub claims 56 million users worldwide, a figure that would double by 2025.
The global community formed around GitHub is growing and diversifying. This is one of the lessons of the GitHub Octoverse Report 2020.
The development and shared code platform, a Microsoft subsidiary, now claims 56 million developers/users worldwide. It aims to reach 100 million developers by 2025.
The three most represented profiles currently are:
1. Developers (54% of total users in 2020, against 60% in 2016)
2. Educators / trainers (23% in 2020, against 17% in 2016)
3. Data specialists (10% this year, +3 points in Four years)
72% of Fortune 50 companies use GitHub Enterprise .
66% of active GitHub users are based outside of North America. 27% connect from Europe.
Overall, the open source community is the most extensive. In addition, 94% of projects are based on open source components, with almost 700 dependencies.
All technological choices combined, GitHub users are responsible for more than 1.9 billion contributions over a year. They have also created more than 60 million new public and private repositories.
What about the most used programming languages?
Python and TypeScript gain momentum
JavaScript, Python, and Java are still the most popular programming languages with the community. TypeScript, C #, PHP, C ++, C, Shell and Ruby follow in the top 10.
Another lesson from the report is that most vulnerabilities are related to errors, code quality flaws, not malware.
“Cyber attacks are more likely to gain attention in cybersecurity circles. Yet 83% of the vulnerabilities (CVEs) that GitHub alerts on are related to errors, ”the authors said. These flaws can be ignored for more than 4 years before being identified. When they are, affected maintainers release a patch “in just over four weeks” on average.
Improving vulnerability detection should be a priority.
