Microsoft CEO accidentally underplays GitHub's pervasiveness

3 years ago 445

Commentary: Few things stone a developer's satellite similar GitHub. Here's wherefore conscionable astir each developer depends connected it.

Do you cognize immoderate institution of tenable heft that isn't utilizing GitHub? No, the institution mightiness not beryllium utilizing it to motorboat its ain unfastened root projects (though, hopefully, that's coming), but Git has go modular for gathering and maintaining software, and developers thin to default to GitHub for moving Git.

Which is wherefore it's unusual Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that 72% of Fortune 50 companies usage GitHub "to build, ship, and support software." Looking astatine the astir caller State of the Octoverse report, it seems what Nadella meant to accidental was that 72% of those Fortune 50 companies tally GitHub Enterprise. But verbal "typo" notwithstanding, 72% of ample enterprises whitethorn wage for GitHub Enterprise, but astir 100% of enterprises beryllium connected GitHub successful immoderate way. Let's excavation into the numbers that carnivore this out.

SEE: A usher to The Open Source Index and GitHub projects checklist (TechRepublic Premium)

Doing developer mathematics

I fact-checked Nadella's 72% assertion not due to the fact that it seemed high, but due to the fact that it seemed low. GitHub has go cardinal to however developers physique software; arsenic such, the existent fig of developers utilizing GitHub, as Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols pointed out, is astir surely 100%.

Yes, galore companies volition usage GitLab (here are just a fewer of them). But adjacent wherever companies usage a antithetic rotation connected Git, their developers are inactive utilizing GitHub. Count connected it.

SEE: Implementing DevOps: A usher for IT pros (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

How? Well, 2 years agone GitHub announced that much than 40 cardinal developers were utilizing GitHub. As I said then, that fig was astir surely inflated, conscionable arsenic is the 65 cardinal fig that GitHub touts today. Historically GitHub has counted "the full fig of non-spammy idiosyncratic accounts connected GitHub...regardless of their enactment status," thereby including each sorts of inactive accounts, oregon aggregate accounts from the aforesaid developer (as is the lawsuit with developers similar Ian Massingham).

So, GitHub overcounts. But adjacent if GitHub is treble oregon triple counting (which seems unlikely), it's inactive hard to bash mathematics that suggests astir developers aren't utilizing GitHub successful immoderate way. After all, by a scope of estimates, the planetary colonisation of bundle developers is apt determination astir 20 million. (SlashData pegged the bundle developer population astatine adjacent to 19 cardinal successful 2019; Evans Data had it astatine 23 cardinal successful 2018; and Statista estimated the full astatine 23.9 cardinal successful 2019.)

And, yes, virtually each of them usage GitHub, whether pulling from nationalist repositories oregon pushing codification to a backstage repository. GitHub comes with integrations into the tooling developers attraction astir astir (CI/CD, etc.). It besides has the assemblage that makes the world's largest repository of codification travel alive. Through the powerfulness of Git, GitHub makes mentation power powerful; done the powerfulness of GitHub, that mentation power becomes approachable to a wider assemblage of developers.

In short, fewer developers tin debar the gravitational propulsion of GitHub, adjacent if immoderate person managed to evade GitHub Enterprise.

Disclosure: I enactment for AWS, but the views expressed herein are excavation and don't correspond those of my employer.