Another Moment of Awesome - nixpkgs top 10

I am sure many have seen it, but I wanted to stop for a second and recognize how awesome this is.
Applauding our entire community! The state of open source software | The State of the Octoverse (github.com)

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The text along side it is pretty bad though :sweat_smile: home-assistant has backing from Nabu Casa who actually make some money now from their gateway service, Blue and Yellow boards, the upcoming Zigbee & Matter stick

Arguably NixOS is the only one that doesn’t see significant backing from a company. The NixOS foundation just receives donations and sponsorships but doesn’t sell anything.

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True!
But hey, maybe Nix swag sales will blow up? :wink:

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Well, “official” nix swag when?
I’m aware of the redbubble store but not having the account name nix or nixos is likely a deterrent.
It’s not instantly obvious proceeds make it to the NixOS Foundation.

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I believe someone brought it up in the Marketing Team discussions.

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Does someone know how the contributor counts were computed? Going over this page and opening the linked repositories, I noticed that only Nixpkgs and AzureDocs actually have a contributor count (as displayed by the GitHub UI) around the numbers displayed in this post. For instance, VS Code is claimed to have 19.8K contributors, but the GitHub repository UI says about 1.8K (and git shortlog -ns | wc -l says about 2.2K). On the other hand, there are repositories with more contributors than most of those in this top 10 which are not listed. E.g., DefinitelyTyped has 16K contributors according to GitHub’s UI…

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I can ping the folks over at Github to ask. Just to confirm our question is how do they calculate/count contributors to a project? Specifically, around these top 10 charts (if it’s different)?

Side note, If I recall these might have been counted as “monthly active” contributors and not all time.

Hi Ron, sorry for the delayed answer.

Yes, that would be the question to ask.

I find it hard to believe that this would be monthly active contributors, since many of these numbers are above what the current GitHub repository UI says (and this one counts all time contributors), unless they do also count projects that are outside the main repository per se (e.g., if for VS Code, they count all the VS Code extension contributors).

On the other hand, one piece of evidence that could show that contributors count only include active contributors is that some projects that were highlighted in the top 10 in previous years are not there anymore even though they had a contributor count that was higher than some in the current top 10.

Unfortunately, GitHub doesn’t properly archive its State of the Octoverse reports, but the Web Archive does. Here is the one for 2016: GitHub Octoverse 2016. Font-Awesome, Docker, npm, patchwork, react-native, Atom, and FreeCodeCamp are 7 out of the top 8 that had over 5k contributors at the time, yet did not make it to the top 10 this time (granted, some of these projects have been archived since, which may be a sufficient reason to exclude them). To further confirm that this is not an all-time count, some of these projects still appeared in the State of the Octoverse 2017, but with a lower contributor count (Font-Awesome went down from 10.6k to 6.8k, Docker went down from 8.2k to 6k, and patchwork went down from 6.8k to 5.9k).

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Pinged our friends at Github, will revert when I receive a response :slight_smile:

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Response from the folks at Github:
In case it’s helpful, I found the exact query. It looks at contributors from Nov 2021 - Nov 2022 looking at all commits, issues, pull requests, discussions, gists, pushes, and pull requests reviews.

It seems you had to have an active contribution within those 12 months in one shape or form to have it count.

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