GitHub offer only a single slice of the world's open-source activitie

[irv]

Even though GitHub is a small slice of the pie, there is something happening. Those contributing open source code Microsoft seems to be on the top of the list.
I am not sure what to make of this? Is there something in the wind with the Operating System giant?
Just read this article from ZNet. From open-source hater to no. 1 fan: Microsoft now tops Google, Facebook in GitHub contributors (http://www.zdnet.com/article/from-open-source-hater-to-no-1-fan-microsoft-now-tops-google-facebook-in-github-contributors/?ftag=TRE17cfd61&bhid=27083111410508975466348956972958)
I know there were other threads on this, but they were all closed.

[ventrical]

Assimilate the code, re-arrange it, make it their own and then sell service licences. That has been the business model since they acquired Q-DOS (with the exception of Edlin of course ). Thanks for great reference.

Regards..

[qyot27]

Or you can just look at it from the perspective that the projects Microsoft has put on Github are fairly large/involved (and perusing github.com/microsoft basically confirms this; it's also mostly their own stuff or things that plug into them), and therefore would have lots of individual commits and contributors. A raw count of commits or contributors might seem impressive, but the nature of any project development is that there's a much smaller core of regular developers and a significantly larger cloud of one-off or occasional contributors who just happened to find bug(s) that needed fixing or wanted to implement something (novel or otherwise) and submitted it back upstream, but then are never heard from again.

Just counting Github contributors is an extraordinarily naive way of measuring Microsoft's supposed commitment to open source. You have to plot time, active development, the number of core developers, and how many outside contributors are regular enough to be statistically significant (due to the way Github - and git in general - works, the branches of a Github project don't necessarily mean a lot; people make throwaway branches that still get counted whether they commit anything to them or not, and as I mentioned before, Github may make it easier for contributors to submit patches back to a project, but how many of those are frequent, and how many of those pull requests are Microsoft's projects merging?). Of course, Microsoft has nearly 2600 people in their Github organization (basically a fancy way of saying who has commit rights to the repositories on the account; those nearly 2600 people likely are spread out amongst *all* of the repos on Microsoft's Github account, not a singular force working on all of them), which is probably a much better measure of activity and dedication. That number dwarfs Google's (~800) and Facebook's (~350) member numbers on Github, but Microsoft is also a much bigger company and can afford to have a much larger number of developers on its payroll. No real surprise there.

The article focuses on the idea that this is proof Microsoft is committed to its statements approving of open source, and try to use the Github data to confirm this. The reality of it is more that - unsurprisingly - Microsoft uses Github like virtually every other company uses Github. Counting contributors is not the real indicator of how much sincerity they have, it's just a way of seeing more realistic numbers on the size of their development resources for a given project (many of which are likely non-production experiments and/or low-to-middle-tier priorities that don't have to be kept under tight control). Reading anything more into it - be it touchy-feely sentimentality or devious conspiracy theory - is absurd.

[vasa1]

... I know there were other threads on this, but they were all closed.
I'm sure efforts to highlight Microsoft's love for open source are most appreciated.