Aiven's analysis of eight years of GitHub data showed how the hyperscalers contribute to open source, and it won coverage in The Register and TechRadar.
Aiven provides managed open source data technologies in the cloud. It was built by developers for developers, so that they can spend their time creating applications.
Reaching developers with open source data
Open source is central to Aiven's culture, which values open-mindedness and giving back to the community. The challenge was to convey that commitment through the media.
GitHub is the world's largest open source code repository and home to many open source projects. GitHub Archive is an open project that records every code submission and timeline event on GitHub, so we proposed a campaign that used its data to measure how much the hyperscalers contribute to open source.
The hyperscalers are contributing more to open source
Google's open source credentials are well known, and Microsoft has fully embraced open source after a rocky start, owning GitHub since 2018. Amazon had a much lower profile, because although AWS is by far the largest public cloud provider, it was not known for giving back.
That began to change, and the shift sped up when Elastic changed the licence of its popular Elasticsearch platform and Amazon created the OpenSearch project in 2021. Resonance used GitHub Archive and Google BigQuery to find out how much each hyperscaler really commits to GitHub.
The analysis produced four main findings, which we built the story around.
- Amazon is now one of the top five open source contributors, as of December 2022.
- In October 2022 Amazon entered the top five active contributors for the first time, with 2,482 contributors making 42,559 commits that month, or 17 each. Five years earlier it had 755 monthly contributors making 7,883 commits, or 10 each.
- Google's monthly commits to GitHub rose 20% year on year, and its active contributors (4,643) overtook Microsoft's (4,394) for the first time since records began in 2016.
- More than a third of Microsoft's open source contributions are in languages that Microsoft maintains, with 37.5% of the languages it uses being PowerShell or C#. Google prefers C++ and Java, while Amazon contributes in Python and Java.
We packaged the findings into a press release with a comment from Heikki Nousiainen, CTO and co-founder of Aiven.
Coverage across the technology press
The research was covered widely in the technology media, with highlights in The Register, TechRadar, BetaNews and TechMonitor, and it strengthened Aiven's open source credentials with developers.
The idea of Aiven came from four Finnish developers called Oskari, Hannu, Heikki and Mika. In their everyday work, they had seen that setting up and maintaining databases was a pain for people who just wanted to develop applications and code in peace.
They felt that data shouldn’t be locked in to one vendor and that the underlying technology should be developed in the open. The best cloud data management tools should be available for anyone who needs them.
