Open Source and Public Code Repository Landscape in 2020

As smart developers, we sure don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Repositories, open source, and cloud, this combination has brought about a significant change in the way developers think of sharing code and best practices. It’s no more about snippets of code, how-to articles, or tutorials. We have millions of developers sharing fully built products that benefit all of us. Whether you are looking to contribute formally to open source, leverage open source in your development, share your code with the community or look up public code, the public repositories are a great melting pot of ideas.

We reviewed multiple providers supporting public repositories and see them organized into these segments — Developer focused public repositories, Business focused public repositories, DevOps tools supporting public repositories, and niche public repositories.

This positioning has evolved over the years across segments. We will be doing follow up deep dive on some of them in subsequent posts. Let us look at how the different providers stack up in these categories.

Developer focused public repositories

No guesses over here! With around 30 million public repositories, GitHub has an undisputed lead in public repositories. Through a combination of developer focus, early mover advantage, and network effect, GitHub has a massive lead over others in the count of public repositories. We will follow up with a post on what these huge numbers mean and what OSS licenses are most popular in the public repositories.

Business focused public repositories

Sourceforge stands out in this category. While they had a strong early mover advantage, the DevShare program lost them many users and impacted the brand. With the new owners stopping DevShare in 2016, they seem to have gotten back a strong user base. They host about 690K open source projects. What we found most interesting was the business focus within open source software. Software spans across e-Commerce, Accounting, HR, CRM, and other areas. The technology domain has the most assets, followed by Entertainment, Engineering, Communications, and Multimedia. Some of the popular projects get about 2 million downloads a week. We found this domain focus lacking in all other providers.

DevOps tools supporting public repositories

Monetization has played a vital role in how public repositories have evolved. With Microsoft’s acquisition, GitHub can support an industry leading position, potentially tilting towards a larger cloud monetization. Sourceforge has taken an advertising monetization positioning helping it sustain a public repository focus. We are seeing most others monetizing through private repositories and pipeline tools that also support public repositories. Key players in this segment are GitLab and Bitbucket. Bitbucket has around 49,000 public repositories and GitLab about 64,500. These don’t provide explore options or detailed searches for the public repositories making discovery difficult.

Niche public repositories

We see different views on open source, repositories, and collaboration, having evolved these multiple products.

With over 5,000 projects, there is recency on the OSDN platform. With a Sourceforge like business focus and catering primarily to Japan, they are sustaining a geographical niche. Launchpad from Canonical has a strong open source focus and manifests as a broader collaboration platform for open source. It lists about 25,000 projects¹. Canonical’s open source focus can help sustain Launchpad in this space. GNU Savannah came out of the GNU project and has about 3800 projects², but with limited recency. Other interesting products are Assembla, Gitea, Rosetta Code that take different approaches, but with very limited public repository counts.

It’s good to see public repositories evolving as a platform for active developer collaboration. With Microsoft GitHub taking a considerable market share, should we be seeing other cloud providers investing in this to scale digital development?

Sources

The count of public repositories is based on our searches on the respective provider repository listing pages and other published information. While every effort has been made to provide accurate and updated information, we regret any omission or error.

[1] Launchpad Code registered number of projects — https://code.launchpad.net/

[2] GNU Savannah repository statistics — https://savannah.gnu.org/stats/