Open-source in India: 3 of 4 coders come from product firms, Amazon leads

Services firms like TCS, Infosys, Cognizant are also catching up on open-source culture

Nearly three out of four best open-source code writers in India are from product companies, Amazon being the top contributor, says a study by recruitment start-up Belong. This clearly shows how the product companies outweigh large services companies in embracing an open-source culture. A close look at the software development platform GitHub reveals that among the top 5,000 open-source contributors, 144 developers come from Amazon followed by Microsoft at 94 and Thoughtworks at 85.

“Interestingly, in a deeper analysis of the top 200 contributors (among 5,000 on GitHub), the study found that most of them worked for product start-ups and not big brands. About 67 per cent of the top 200 contributors work for product and service companies with less than 200 employees,” added the study. 

This, according to the Belong study, proves that hiring for quality developers do not necessarily have to be sourcing from big software services companies.

The Bengaluru-based data-driven outbound hiring start-up analysed the developer universe in India and found that amongst the 75,000 registered users, Amazon had the highest number of registered users on Github, followed by Cognizant, TCS and Microsoft. 

Even though IT-enabled services have the largest contribution to the platform with the highest number of engineers, the majority of contribution towards open-source is made by developers working in product companies such as Amazon. 

“The ITES sector accounted for 41 per cent developers; while their actual open-source contributions fell to 22 per cent among the top 200 contributors,” pointed out the study. 

Women, however, seen to have an abysmal contribution in open-source development with only 6 per cent being women developers at a time when they form one-fourth (26 per cent) of technology jobs in the country. 

“Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco and ThoughtWorks have the highest female open source contributors. The users come from universities such as BITS, VTU, University of Pune and Anna University.”

Of the 5,000 contributors on GitHub, 208 developers came from BITS Pilani, followed by VIT and IIT Kharagpur.