As the open-source community completed a decade of existence, GitHub a US-based global company that provides hosting for software development version control using Git released a report which reveals the top open source project trends for 2020, on the basis of contributors, visitors, and star activity data.
Today, GitHub is used by millions of developers to share code and build business. It isn’t just about the code (like all things in life), it’s the people that keep the project moving forward and alive along with the community of users.
TensorFlow/TensorFlow (24k) and Microsoft/vscode (15k) had the most number of active repositories in 2017. While Kubernetes/Kubernetes was the most discussed repository in the year.
GitHub is home to open source projects written in 337 unique programming languages, especially JavaScript. Java, the second most popular language on GitHub, has been replaced by Python.
Latest trends in open source projects
Below are the top open-source project trends to look out for in the year ahead.
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Cross-platform development
GitHub revealed that cross-platform/web development showed the highest activity growth in 2017. It was the most contributed, most visited, and most starred project.
The cross-platform development leads to easier development process and enables deployment across desktop and mobile platforms in lesser time.
As per the data, Angular/angular-cli repository saw the highest growth, with a 2.2 time increase in contributors in 2017, as compared to a year ago.
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Deep learning & Machine learning
Artificial intelligence, especially its deep learning category, drove the interest of a number of users. The deep learning projects like Keras-team/Keras and Mozilla/DeepSpeech were the most contributed projects in 2017.
The visitors for TensorFlow/TensorFlow in 2017 grew 2.2 times from 2016, while TensowFlow/models visitors grew 5.5 times.
The popularity of image and speech recognition, and other such technologies among enterprises, is contributing towards the implementation of deep learning.
Machine learning, the practice of teaching a computer to learn, attracted users to the repositories, including scikit-learn/scikit-learn and keras-team/keras.
While Tensorflow repository provides scalable machine learning using data flow graphs, scikit-learn offers machine learning in Python language.
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New skills
The repositories which were designed to teach new coding skills ranked third in the list. Users starred a lot of projects related to getting coding jobs, learning to code, and coding best practices. Like, Chalarangelo/30-seconds-of-code and norvig/pytudes helped users with code examples in JavaScript and Python, respectively and helped users gain fluency in them.
There were more coding skills which guided users with ways to pass software engineering interviews, and in picking up or brushing existing skills.
Apart from these open source project trends, code editing, containerization, development, and design also saw growth in the last few years.