Dive Brief:
- Microsoft was the biggest contributor to open source projects on GitHub over the last year, according to Network World report and data released from GitHub.
- A total of 16,419 contributors affiliated with Microsoft worked on GitHub projects in the last 12 months, GitHub reported.
- Facebook came in second place with 15,682 contributors, followed closely by Docker with 14,059. Google had 12,140 contributors during the same timeframe, according to GitHub.
Dive Insight:
Enterprises are frequently turning to open source and third party software components to decrease the amount of code they have to write, which helps accelerate deployment cycles, according to Sonatype’s 2016 State of the Software Supply Chain.
Microsoft has increasingly embraced the open source model over the past few years, a huge leap from where it stood several years ago when former CEO Steve Ballmer compared Linux to "communism" and a "cancer."
But recently, Microsoft has become much more willing to work with open source vendors and rival companies in an effort to attract more large business customers.
The company may also be more receptive to open source because companies like Facebook and Google have embraced it. In July, Facebook announced it added 54 new open source projects to their portfolio the first six months of 2016, according to a company blog post.
