Skip to content
back to the archive page
#OpenSource

[1/4] Comparing GitHub’s Octoverse Reports for 2023–2025 (Category OpenSource)

#OpenSource #AI #ML #Software #Architecture #Processes #DevEx #Devops #Metrics #Engineering

Image 1 of 1 for “Part 1 of 4: Comparing GitHub’s Octoverse Reports for 2023–2025”

After covering GitHub’s Octoverse 2025 report, I wanted to look at trends over the three years since the ChatGPT moment. That seems long enough to see changes in development processes, tool popularity, engineering productivity, and whatever else. Today, let us compare:

GitHub community growth and development volume The community grew rapidly over these three years:

  • Registered developers passed 100 million in early 2023, roughly 26% growth year over year.
  • Growth accelerated in 2024, with about 36 million new users, mainly from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
  • By October 2025, the total exceeded 180 million, marking GitHub’s fastest absolute growth ever. At least one developer joined every second on average during 2025, equivalent to more than 36 million newcomers in the year.

Repositories and commits Code activity grew alongside the community:

  • In 2023, GitHub recorded around 4.5 billion contributions, including commits, pull requests, and comments: about 4.2 billion in private repositories and 0.31 billion in public ones.
  • In 2024, annual contributions reached 5.2–5.6 billion, with nearly 1 billion in public projects. Public contributions roughly tripled, while private activity stayed more or less the same.
  • In 2025, contributions passed 6 billion, including 1.12 billion in open source, up 13% annually. Developers pushed about 1 billion commits, up 25% year over year. Pull-request merges averaged 43.2 million a month, or roughly 519 million annually, up 23%. Total repositories reached 630 million, compared with around 518 million a year earlier.

Open source versus private Most activity was in private repositories in all three years:

  • Around 80% of contributions in 2023.
  • Roughly 82% in 2024: 4.3 billion out of 5.2 billion.
  • Around 81.5% in 2025: nearly 5 billion out of 6 billion. Yet public repositories outnumber private ones. In 2025, 63% of projects were public, about 395 million repositories, an increase of 72 million over the year. This highlights GitHub’s dual role: everyday development largely happens privately, but relies heavily on open-source libraries and frameworks.

#AI #ML #Software #Architecture #Processes #DevEx #Devops #Metrics #Engineering #OpenSource #Architecture