As per the most recent StackOverflow survey (link provided in article) around 63.3% of developers contribute to open source. Another survey by BlackDuck (link also provided) claims that around 67% of developers contribute in one or another form. I rounded up the 67% to 70% because 7 out of 10 makes more sense than to say 6.7 out of 10 developers.
We could debate the accuracy of these surveys but, what's clear is that there are more developers who contribute compared to the years before.
The percentage of people contributing also depends a lot on how the question was asked by those doing the survey. Regardless, I agree the interesting part is it’s growing over time.
Also, remember, contributions come in many forms - also non-code contributions are important! They can come in many forms:
f Fixing doc nits (when you misunderstand something, realize “why didn’t they explain it like this”, you can take the time to propose even just a small fix)
Participate in issue or forum discussions, to answer or clarify.
Heck, even just asking - good - questions. It feeds those who like to answer :-)
Thank you for sharing the other forms of contributions. I totally agree with you, asking and answering questions also counts as contribution.
When contributing to ElasticSearch, somebody made a pull request that I had some knowledge of based on an issue I worked on. I did a review of the pull request (you can check it out above) and provided the contributor some feedback that I knew the maintainer would give him anyway (the maintainer was thankful of the feedback - see github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/p...).
Providing feedback to a pull request in the form of code review (majority of repositories allow it) is another form of contribution. This helps both the contributor and maintainer.
A London Web Developer. A lot of my professional experience is in digital agencies and I enjoy helping new front-end developers learn how to code websites.
I was wondering about this statement, this number seems really high. I was wondering where you got this number from?
As per the most recent StackOverflow survey (link provided in article) around 63.3% of developers contribute to open source. Another survey by BlackDuck (link also provided) claims that around 67% of developers contribute in one or another form. I rounded up the 67% to 70% because 7 out of 10 makes more sense than to say 6.7 out of 10 developers.
We could debate the accuracy of these surveys but, what's clear is that there are more developers who contribute compared to the years before.
Thank you for providing sources. 👌🏾 I was just surprised of the number using my own experiences as anecdotal evidence. 😮
The percentage of people contributing also depends a lot on how the question was asked by those doing the survey. Regardless, I agree the interesting part is it’s growing over time.
Also, remember, contributions come in many forms - also non-code contributions are important! They can come in many forms:
fFixing doc nits (when you misunderstand something, realize “why didn’t they explain it like this”, you can take the time to propose even just a small fix)Participate in issue or forum discussions, to answer or clarify.
Heck, even just asking - good - questions. It feeds those who like to answer :-)
Thank you for sharing the other forms of contributions. I totally agree with you, asking and answering questions also counts as contribution.
When contributing to ElasticSearch, somebody made a pull request that I had some knowledge of based on an issue I worked on. I did a review of the pull request (you can check it out above) and provided the contributor some feedback that I knew the maintainer would give him anyway (the maintainer was thankful of the feedback - see github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/p...).
Providing feedback to a pull request in the form of code review (majority of repositories allow it) is another form of contribution. This helps both the contributor and maintainer.
1 out 20/30 seems a lot more believable.