Countries with the Most Open Source Contributors (2025 Ranked)
Photo: Bibek ghosh / Pexels
GitHub counted more than 36 million new developers in 2025, and the country that added the most was not the one with the most developers overall. The United States still leads with 28 million developers, but India, at 21.9 million, added 5.2 million of them in a single year and now leads the world in open source contributors. This article ranks countries using GitHub's own Octoverse data, explains how the numbers are built, and shows where a headcount ranking misleads.
Key takeaways
- The United States had 28 million developers on GitHub in 2025, up from 10.2 million in 2020, and ranks first for open source contributions (GitHub Octoverse 2025).
- India had 21.9 million developers, up from 4.5 million in 2020, and ranks first for the number of open source contributors, with the US second (Octoverse 2025).
- Brazil (6.89 million developers) ranks third for both contributors and contributions in the 2025 report.
- Germany ranked third for contributions in the 2024 report while ranking seventh by developer population, a sign that headcount and activity are different things.
- A Harvard Business School working paper estimated the demand-side value of widely used open source software at $8.8 trillion, but that is a replacement-cost model, not a market price.
How GitHub decides which country a developer lives in
Every ranking in this article rests on one assumption: that GitHub knows where its users are. It does, but only approximately, and the method matters for how far you can trust a country total.
GitHub's Innovation Graph, the public dataset behind much of the country-level research, assigns a developer to an economy using the "mode daily location," meaning the place the account is most often active from. Repositories and organizations are assigned by the most common location among their members. The Innovation Graph publishes a metric for an economy only when at least 100 unique developers performed the relevant activity in the period, so very small countries drop out.
A second source is GitHub's own trade-compliance system. GitHub's published policy says it determines location from signals such as IP addresses and payment history, not from nationality. That is how the platform decides, for example, whether an account is in Crimea, Donetsk, or Luhansk, where access is limited, or in North Korea, where services are not available.
An analogy helps here. Counting developers by country is like counting restaurant customers by the postcode of their phone signal. You learn where the phones were, not where the cooks live or who owns the kitchen. A developer in Berlin employed by a San Francisco company shows up in Germany's column, and a student in Lagos using a VPN may not show up in Nigeria's.
The 2025 ranking: developers by country
The table below combines the two most recent Octoverse reports. The 2025 report gives exact counts for only four countries in its text, so the other rows come from the 2024 report. The year column tells you which is which. Counts are developer accounts, not contributors to any particular project.
| Country | Developers on GitHub | Year-over-year growth | Source year |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 28 million | not stated | Octoverse 2025 |
| India | 21.9 million | about 29% (from more than 17 million) | Octoverse 2025 |
| Brazil | 6.89 million | not stated | Octoverse 2025 |
| Indonesia | 4.37 million | not stated | Octoverse 2025 |
| China | more than 9 million | 10% | Octoverse 2024 |
| United Kingdom | more than 4 million | 19% | Octoverse 2024 |
| Japan | more than 3.5 million | 23% | Octoverse 2024 |
| Germany | more than 3.5 million | 21% | Octoverse 2024 |
| Mexico | more than 1.9 million | 21% | Octoverse 2024 |
| Netherlands | 1.3 million | not stated | Octoverse 2024 |
| Nigeria | more than 1.1 million | 28% | Octoverse 2024 |
Two cautions apply. First, the 2024 and 2025 rows are not directly comparable, because a country listed at "more than 3.5 million" in 2024 has almost certainly grown since. Second, the India growth figure is calculated from the two reports (21.9 million divided by 17 million), not a number GitHub published.
Source: GitHub Octoverse 2024 and GitHub Octoverse 2025.
Contributors versus contributions: why the order flips
Open source "activity" can be measured at least three ways, and each puts countries in a different order. Developers are accounts that exist. Contributors are accounts that contributed to open source projects in the period. Contributions are the actions themselves: commits, pull requests, issues, and reviews.
A country with many students and early-career programmers can lead on contributors, because each person makes a handful of contributions. A country with many professionals employed to maintain large projects can lead on contributions, because each person makes thousands. The 2025 report shows exactly this split.
| Metric | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open source contributors (2025) | India | United States | Brazil | Octoverse 2025 |
| Open source contributions (2025) | United States | India | Brazil | Octoverse 2025 |
| Open source contributions (2024) | United States | India | Germany | Octoverse 2024 |
In the 2024 report, Brazil ranked fourth for contributions, the United Kingdom fifth, and Japan tenth. The 2025 text names Indonesia, Germany, and the United Kingdom as the next tier, without giving their exact order. It also lists South Korea, France, Canada, Japan, and Russia among the remaining top 10 countries.
Germany is the instructive case. In 2024 it ranked third for contributions but only seventh by developer population. That gap is the signature of a country where a large share of developers contribute regularly, often as part of their jobs, rather than a country with a very large pool of accounts.
Five years of growth, 2020 to 2025
The fastest change in the data is not at the top of the table but in how quickly the bottom of the world's developer map filled in. Octoverse 2025 compares 2020 with 2025 and reports multiples rather than a full table, so the figures below combine the counts it gives.
| Country | Developers in 2020 | Developers in 2025 | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 10.2 million | 28 million | about 2.7x |
| India | 4.5 million | 21.9 million | about 4.9x |
| Indonesia | 0.9 million | 4.37 million | about 4.9x |
The report's own summary is that India, Brazil, and Indonesia grew more than fourfold in five years, Japan and Germany more than threefold, and the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada more than twofold. The multiples in the table are calculated from the counts in the report.
By region, Octoverse 2025 reports net new developers between 2024 and 2025 of about 13 million in Asia-Pacific, 6.3 million in Europe, 3.4 million in Africa and the Middle East, and 3.2 million in Latin America. In total, more than 36 million developers joined in 2025, and India's 5.2 million made up a little over 14% of them.
Octoverse 2025 also looks ahead. It says India is poised to overtake the United States in developer population within the next few years. Its chart gives 2030 projections of 57.5 million for India and 54.7 million for the United States, while the report's text uses a lower figure for the US, so the projections should be read as rough. The 2024 report had put the crossover at 2028.
The United States: governance and corporate stewardship
The United States leads on both developers (28 million) and contributions, and ranks first for contributions in both the 2024 and 2025 reports. It also leads on generative AI: the 2025 report counts roughly 12.8 million contributions to public generative AI projects from US developers, about 31.8% of the total.
The headcount understates the US role in one respect. Many of the largest projects are governed by US-based foundations or began inside US companies. Kubernetes, for instance, began as a Google project, drew on the lessons of Google's internal Borg cluster manager, and was contributed to the new Cloud Native Computing Foundation when version 1.0 shipped in 2015. A foundation hosts a project's trademarks, finances, and neutral governance, which matters most when many competing companies depend on the same code.
The caveat is the same one that applies to every country. "United States" in this data means accounts located in the United States. Google, Microsoft, and Meta employ engineers worldwide, and a German engineer working on a Google project is counted in Germany. A US lead in contributions is therefore partly a lead in where large companies pay people to work, and partly a lead in volunteers.
India: the largest new developer population
India added more than 5.2 million developers in 2025, the largest single-country addition, and sits second in total developers with 21.9 million. In 2020 it had 4.5 million. It also ranks first for the number of open source contributors in the 2025 report, and second for contributions.
Generative AI shows the pattern clearly. India accounts for about 5 million contributions to public generative AI projects, roughly 12.5% of the total, against about 12.8 million for the United States. Yet India leads in the number of distinct generative AI repositories: about 405,000 versus about 342,000 for the US. More repositories with fewer contributions each is consistent with many small and early-stage projects, though the report does not say so explicitly, and that reading is an interpretation, not a finding.
No public dataset measures contribution quality by country, so a headcount cannot say whether one country's contributions are better than another's. What the data does support is narrower: India's weight in open source is growing faster than any other large country's, and the open question is how much of that growth turns into long-term maintainers.
China: a large base with a separate platform ecosystem
Octoverse 2024 put China at more than 9 million developers on GitHub, growing 10% year over year. That growth rate was the lowest of the large countries in the report, well below India's 28% and Brazil's 27%. The 2025 text does not state a China figure, because it appears only in a chart.
GitHub is not the whole story for China. Gitee, launched in 2013 by Shenzhen-based OSCHINA, is a domestic code-hosting platform. In July 2020, according to Sixth Tone reporting at the time, Gitee's parent company won a project contract from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology for a domestic open source code hosting platform. Gitee's own website then claimed about 5 million registered members and 10 million projects. Any country ranking built on GitHub alone therefore undercounts Chinese developers who work mainly on domestic platforms.
China's contribution to the infrastructure layer is also visible outside GitHub's counts. Huawei donated the code for a pure HarmonyOS branch to the OpenAtom Foundation, and the first version of OpenHarmony launched on September 10, 2020. OpenHarmony is the open source counterpart of Huawei's commercial HarmonyOS. And when the Log4Shell vulnerability surfaced in 2021, it was Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba Cloud's security team who privately reported it to the Apache Software Foundation on November 24, 2021.
The policy backdrop matters for interpretation. GitHub applies US trade controls, and its policy lists specific regions where access is limited. That does not affect most developers in mainland China, but it explains why governments and companies there have sought domestic alternatives.
Germany: third in contributions with a smaller developer base
Germany had more than 3.5 million developers in the 2024 report, growing 21% year over year, which placed it seventh by developer population. Yet it ranked third for open source contributions, and fourth for generative AI contributions with the fifth-largest number of generative AI contributors.
What explains the gap? The data cannot say, because Octoverse reports the ranks, not the causes. Plausible contributors include a large base of professional developers working for firms that maintain open source as part of their products, but that remains a hypothesis. The Netherlands, by comparison, had 1.3 million developers in 2024, yet 291% growth in generative AI contributors, which shows how quickly smaller developer populations can move on a single metric.
Germany also has a long public-sector history with open source, and it is a useful corrective to simple stories. In 2003 Munich's council backed a Linux option, and the city launched LiMux in 2004. By 2012, 12,600 of its 15,500 desktops ran LiMux. In November 2017 the council decided to return to Windows-based software by 2020. The city's record is mixed rather than a clean success or failure. In May 2020 the new governing coalition said it would favor free software and open standards where feasible, and in October 2024 Munich adopted a five-point open source plan and founded an Open Source Program Office.
On the volunteer side, Germany is the birthplace of KDE. Matthias Ettrich, then a student at the University of Tübingen, announced the project on Usenet on October 14, 1996. It is a reminder that the open source ecosystem has long had national roots, even though the code is global.
Brazil, Indonesia, and the growth economies
Brazil's 6.89 million developers make it fourth in the world by head count, and third for both contributors and contributions in Octoverse 2025. Its five-year growth was more than fourfold. Indonesia grew from 0.9 million developers in 2020 to 4.37 million in 2025.
In Africa, Octoverse 2024 listed Nigeria at more than 1.1 million developers (28% growth), Egypt at more than 990,000 (25%), South Africa at more than 664,000 (23%), and Kenya at more than 393,000 (33%). Those are small counts next to the US or India, but the growth rates are high. Kenya's 33% was the top rate among the countries listed here.
For the sum, the 2025 report found Africa and the Middle East added about 3.4 million developers in a year. Growth at that pace changes who writes open source over a decade, even if the top of the ranking looks stable for several more years. The practical question is not whether these countries have developers but whether they have employers who fund open source work and foundations that include them in governance.
What open source is worth, and who pays for it
The most cited economic figure comes from a Harvard Business School working paper by Manuel Hoffmann, Frank Nagle, and Yanuo Zhou, "The Value of Open Source Software" (Strategy Unit Working Paper 24-038, 2024). It estimates the supply-side value of widely used open source software at $4.15 billion, and the demand-side value at $8.8 trillion.
Those are different questions. The supply-side figure assumes the most widely used packages would have to be rewritten once. The demand-side figure assumes each company would have to rebuild every package it uses. The authors also find that firms would need to spend about 3.5 times more on software than they do now if open source did not exist. Because it is a modeled estimate built on assumptions about rebuilding costs, $8.8 trillion is best read as a replacement-cost scenario, not as money anyone earns or spends.
The 2,000-to-1 gap: The $8.8 trillion demand-side estimate is roughly 2,000 times the $4.15 billion supply-side estimate. The ratio is calculated from the paper's two headline numbers, and it describes a modeling choice more than a measured return on investment.
The cost of under-funding shows up in security. Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) was a critical remote-code-execution flaw in Apache's Log4j logging library. The flaw had existed since 2013, was privately reported on November 24, 2021, and fixed in version 2.15.0-rc1 on December 6 before public disclosure on December 9. Apache gave it the highest possible severity rating, CVSS 10. Wiz and EY found that it affected 93% of enterprise cloud environments, and CISA's director called it one of the most serious vulnerabilities she had seen in her career. CISA issued Emergency Directive 22-02 on December 17, 2021.
The Linux Foundation and Harvard's Laboratory for Innovation Science, with the Open Source Security Foundation, published "Census II" to measure which application-level libraries companies actually use in production, drawing on data from software composition analysis firms. It is the follow-up to Census I, which covered lower-level system software. For readers interested in how dependency risk shows up in practice, the site's cybersecurity threats overview covers supply-chain attacks, and open source software licenses and economics goes deeper on the funding question.
What the rankings cannot tell you
A country ranking is a convenient number and a poor explanation. Five limits matter most.
Accounts are not people. A developer can hold several accounts, and automation accounts exist. The datasets count accounts, not verified individuals.
GitHub is not all of open source. Gitee, GitLab, Codeberg, and self-hosted servers hold large amounts of code. The Linux kernel is developed by mailing list and distributed through multiple mirrors, so GitHub captures only part of it.
Location is a signal, not a nationality. A developer who travels, uses a VPN, or works remotely for a foreign firm is counted where the account is active.
Public activity only. The Innovation Graph counts only public activity. Companies keep large amounts of work in private repositories, so a country with many corporate engineers may look quieter than it is.
Volume is not impact. One careful security patch to a widely used library can matter more than thousands of commits to a student project. No public measure ranks countries by the importance of their code.
Related national rankings help triangulate. The number of professional programmers is covered in countries with the most tech workers, research investment in countries with the highest R&D spending, and the commercial side of software in countries with the most unicorn startups. Compare them with the GitHub numbers and you will see where developer counts and economic weight diverge.
Where the data comes from
| Data point | Source | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Country developer counts (US, India, Brazil, Indonesia) | GitHub Octoverse 2025 | 2025 |
| Developer counts and growth (China, UK, Japan, Germany, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, Kenya) | GitHub Octoverse 2024 | 2024 |
| Contribution and contributor ranks | GitHub Octoverse 2024 and 2025 | 2024, 2025 |
| Location method | GitHub Innovation Graph methodology; GitHub trade-controls policy | current |
| Open source value | Hoffmann, Nagle, and Zhou, Harvard Business School working paper | 2024 |
| Log4Shell timeline | CISA guidance; Wikipedia summary of the disclosure | 2021 to 2022 |
| Gitee background | Sixth Tone, August 26, 2020 | 2020 |
| LiMux history | Wikipedia (LiMux) | to 2024 |
Frequently asked questions
Q: Which country has the most open source contributors? A: It depends on the metric. In Octoverse 2025, India ranks first for the number of open source contributors, with the United States second and Brazil third. The United States ranks first for the number of contributions, with India second and Brazil third. The United States also has the most developers overall, at 28 million.
Q: Will India overtake the United States in GitHub developers? A: GitHub projects that it will. Octoverse 2024 predicted India would pass the US by 2028, and Octoverse 2025 says India is poised to overtake the US within the next few years. India had 21.9 million developers to the US's 28 million in 2025, but India added 5.2 million that year. Projections extend a trend and can change.
Q: Why does Germany rank so high for contributions with fewer developers? A: Octoverse 2024 ranked Germany third for contributions and seventh by developer population but does not explain the gap. One plausible reading is that a large share of German developers contribute regularly, often as part of their jobs, but that is a hypothesis rather than a measured result.
Q: Does a higher developer count mean more influence over open source software? A: Not directly. Developer counts measure accounts, and influence depends on who maintains widely used projects, who sits on foundation boards, and who funds the work. A country can have millions of new accounts and few maintainers of critical infrastructure, or the reverse.
Q: Is the $8.8 trillion figure real money? A: No. It is a replacement-cost estimate from a Harvard Business School working paper: what firms would have to spend to rebuild every widely used package they depend on if open source did not exist. The paper's supply-side estimate, which assumes each package is rewritten once, is $4.15 billion. It is a modeled scenario, not a measured market value.
Q: Can a beginner contribute to open source? A: Yes. Many projects accept documentation fixes, translations, bug reports, design work, and accessibility testing, not only code. Projects often tag beginner-friendly tasks with labels such as "good first issue." The practical path is to pick a tool you already use and look for a contribution that matches your current skills.
Q: What is the difference between open source and free software? A: Both describe software whose source code can be studied, modified, and redistributed. The Open Source Initiative maintains the Open Source Definition, a list of ten criteria derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The Free Software Foundation frames the same idea as user freedoms. Most open source software also counts as free software, so the difference is mainly philosophy and emphasis.
The takeaway
Open source has stopped being a story about one country. The United States still has the largest developer base and the most contributions, but India now has the most contributors, Brazil and Indonesia have grown more than fourfold in five years, and Germany shows that a smaller developer population can still rank near the top for activity. The more useful question than "who is first" is "who maintains what." Log4Shell showed how much of the digital economy can rest on code that a few people look after, and the Harvard estimate shows how large the gap is between what open source costs to produce and what it would cost to replace. Rankings built on accounts will keep shifting as new developers arrive. The harder, slower question is how many of them become maintainers, and who pays them.
Sources
- GitHub Octoverse 2024
- GitHub Octoverse 2025
- GitHub Innovation Graph
- GitHub and trade controls
- Simon Willison on "The Value of Open Source Software" (Hoffmann, Nagle, Zhou, 2024)
- CISA: Apache Log4j vulnerability guidance
- Log4Shell (Wikipedia)
- Linux Foundation: Census II of free and open source software application libraries
- Sixth Tone: Chinese government touts homegrown alternative to GitHub (2020)
- OpenHarmony (Wikipedia)
- LiMux (Wikipedia)
- Open Source Initiative: The Open Source Definition
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About the Author
SciHub101 is an independent science and technology publication founded and edited by Buğra Sözeri, a software engineer and app developer based in Türkiye. AI tools assist with drafting and research. Source documentation in the existing archive is uneven, and articles are being reviewed and corrected. The Editorial Team byline identifies editorial responsibility; it does not certify specialist or independent human review. Where we compare products, anything built by our own team is labelled as such — see the editorial guidelines and About page for how corrections and disclosures work.
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