An Investigation of Cross-country Differences in Open Source Software Activity

This study explores the heterogeneity in Open Source Software (OSS) contributions across countries and identifies differences in collaboration patterns that can explain the differences in activity levels between sampled countries. We show that countries with significant user followers on GitHub exhibit a large average membership in organizations. The results also highlight the developed countries as having a higher organizations-to-developer ratio. Based on NLP analysis of the bios of developers and organizations, we observe that countries that ranked high in GitHub activity tend to ascribe to the OSS ideology and exhibit entrepreneurial spirit. Users in countries that ranked low are likely to have students, academics, or independent security specialists engaged in GitHub activity. We hope that this work is a step towards building the necessary tools to understand OSS health across countries.