India fastest growing open source contributor: GitHub

BENGALURU: The pandemic has been the best of times and the worst of times. Data with code hosting platform

GitHub

shows that Indian programmers made the best out of their isolation - 1.8 million more developers joined the platform during the past one year and contributed way more than their global peers.


GitHub said on Friday that India is the fastest growing country in the world in terms of new developers contributing to open source. The number of contributions increased by 75% in India, against 40% in the rest of the world last year. The overall India developer community on GitHub is 5.8 million-strong. "We predict that by February 2023, we will have over 10 million developers in India writing code and building important software for the world on Github," said Erica Brescia, the company's chief operating officer.


In a first for India, GitHub announced a Rs 1 crore grant for

open source projects

from the country that need support. Though most of the world runs on open source code, globally, there has been little or no incentive for the maintainers and developers who are a part of these projects as hobbyists or volunteers. "There's a new trend in India where students and startups are creating more open source projects and giving it to the community. The grant intends to give them the support that they need in continuing to build on these projects," said Maneesh Sharma, country manager, GitHub India. Applications are open and a jury of three has been drafted in to identify the projects.