Github Releases 2020 State Of The OCTOVERSE Report

Dec. 21, 2020, 6:51 p.m.

TL;DR

Github has released the 2020 State of the OCTOVERSE report, and it states that 56 million developers globally are building on Github. More than 60 million new repositories were created, and 1.9 billion contributions were added.

Most vulnerabilities are caused due to mistakes and not malicious attacks.

Key Facts

1
North America had the most number of active Github users in the world at 34%, with Asia following second at 30.7% and Europe at 26.8%.
2
Javascript, Python, Java, TypeScript, C#, PHP, C++, C, Shell, and Ruby are the top languages for 2020.
3
The report indicated that 35% more repositories were created in comparison to 2019. Also, there was a 25% increase in the contribution to Open Source projects as compared to last year.
4
Nigeria recorded the strongest growth in contributors at 65.9%, with Hong Kong in the second place at 64.5% and Saudi Arabia in the third place at 60.1%
5
2020 saw Open Source contributors from the US drop to 22.7%. Strong contributors have emerged from China (9.76%) and India (5.2%), followed by Germany (6.43%), UK (4.51%), France (3.52%), Japan (2.49%), and Australia (1.71%).

Details

According to the 2020 State of the OCTOVERSE report, there was an influx of timely OSS projects, with trending topics like COVID19, angular9, bsa20, dataworkshop, and vercel. The increase of 35% in repositories has been attributed to developers taking advantage of flexible work schedules to manage their time and energy and maintain productivity over a long period.

The report also observed that developer work dropped on the weekends, while Open Source activity spiked. The 25% increase in Open Source projects could be a result of this, which shows that Open Source is both a place to learn and create.

Most vulnerabilities are caused due to mistakes and not malicious attacks. An analysis of 521 random samples indicated that only 17% of the advisories were related to explicitly malicious behavior.

The report also suggests that 94% of projects rely on Open Source components, with around 700 dependencies. The most frequent use of Open Source dependencies was seen in Javascript at 94%, Ruby at 90%, and .NET at 90%.

In the OCTOVERSE 2020 security report, Github highlights that since software and systems are evolving, the need to build new features to maintain the infrastructure is also increasing. While the attack surfaces are evolving, teams and projects are learning how to secure software and systems.