The latest entry in GitHub’s State of the Octoverse series was a massive undertaking based on a survey of over 12,000 developers, and separately analyzed data from 4 million repositories including many from paid GitHub Team or Enterprise Cloud accounts.
One theme that runs throughout the findings is that developers who spend most of their time doing software development for a private company’s repositories (47%) or are focused on an open source project while working for a private company (5.5%) behave differently than those other professional developers (13.5%) and students (29%) that are still engaged in the open source community.
Two-thirds (67%) of the developers surveyed said the ability to innovate without legal risk is an important priority. Yet, only 24% thought government investment in and contribution to open source is important.
In between these two public policy goals, almost half (47%) supported healthy online collaboration, and efforts to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to become a developer. GitHub’s analysis provides additional evidence that adding and improving on existing documentation can help developers become more productive, writing code quicker while sustaining lasting communities.
Private versus public, work versus open source. Meritocracy versus justice. These universal memes just won’t go away.
The complete article can be found here.
