Microsoft recently acquired Github.com, which made a lot of noise. I don’t know what Github is. But one of the comments on the article said that Microsoft is now the biggest contributor to Github, and believe it or not, I don’t believe it.

So to find a source of this data, is probably this article www.oschina.net/news/90001/… There are several charts, but the one ranked by Githuber has Microsoft at number one…






This chart is 17 years old, the data is a little old, but in any case, according to Githuber ranking is not rational, otherwise you only need a red header file to brush the first.

A more reasonable ranking would be based on the sum of star contributions, as shown below in 18 years.















In fact, according to the total star ranking of contribution projects, there is a problem, which is related to the company’s contribution strategy. Some companies use email only to contribute to company-led projects, while others, such as Microsoft, use email to contribute to all projects, so you can see projects like Ansible, which are not Microsoft led but are also counted. If we take that out of the picture and compare Google and Microsoft, the gap is much bigger

Take a look at the projects led by each company. Googletop10 projects are all Google-led (NodeJS author is now at Google, so I put NodeJS also considered Google-led), while Microsoft top10 projects in Electron, Ansible, None of Moby’s projects are Microsoft’s (Helm was recently acquired by Microsoft), and removing these projects leaves Microsoft’s star program at 68%.

In terms of project quality, TensorFlow is the first project ranked by Google. The more famous project is TensorFlow. Flutter, Kubernetes, Angular and Protobuf are all heavyweight projects that are widely used by many companies. The Microsoft project has nothing to offer except vscode, and although I’m a fan of vscode, vscode is just an editor. So in terms of project weight, not a level, Microsoft seems to be behind Fb in this respect.

Bottom line: Microsoft is not only behind Google in the impact of open source initiatives, it’s not even close. Google’s influence on open source is by far the largest of any company, slightly less than that of the next 10 companies combined, based on star, the leading project.

If Microsoft realized that gap, just decided to buy a lot, it is unclear, but Microsoft’s recent acquisition of helm, the action of making, Microsoft is interested in enhancing influence in the field of open source, it may be beneficial influence on the azure, because, after all, the so-called cloud computing, but is in a cloud host to run open-source software.