In recent years, open source technology has received more and more attention. Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub and IBM's acquisition of Red Hat have all demonstrated the value of open source. Domestic companies are also increasingly participating in open source, joining open source foundations/contributing to open source projects. But how well are they doing? For this reason, InfoQ counted more than 2,800 projects of more than 50 accounts of 7 domestic first-line Internet companies that are more active on GitHub, and presented some answers for you.
1. Company and account number
The companies participating in the statistics include Baidu, Ali, Tencent, Huawei, Meituan, 360, and Xiaomi, a total of 7 companies. At the beginning, we selected 10 companies, all of which are representative of the domestic Internet Enterprises, but because the other three companies either did not manage their own open source projects in a unified manner, or there were too few open source projects to be of value for analysis, so we deleted them.
In the process of collecting the open source accounts of these 7 companies, we tried our best to collect information on the Internet to avoid omissions. However, due to different statistical calibers, some companies only recognize projects under the main account of the GitHub company, which may make it difficult for team accounts. Comprehensive collection. However, we also believe that it is necessary to collect company accounts that appear as a team, and their behavior also represents a part of the company. The company should also regard these accounts as part of the company's open source strategy and conduct unified governance.
details as follows:
Note: Ele.me and Youku have been acquired by Ali, so they belong to Ali. The data analyzed below are based on non-fork projects.
2. TOP10 open source projects
Top 10 projects with the most stars
The more Stars, the more popular the project is. Among the top 10 open source projects with Stars, Ali has 6 projects, Baidu has 1 project, Tencent has 2 projects, and Meituan has 1 project.
Ant-design of Ant Financial takes the lead with 43,000 stars, and it is one of the most popular open source projects even in the whole of China. In terms of calculating the number of projects of the company, Ali is far ahead with 6, which shows that Ali is widely recognized by developers in terms of open source.
In terms of fields, among the projects with the most stars, there are 7 front-end related projects, taking the top three. On the one hand, it shows that domestic companies do the best in front-end open source. On the other hand, it is also because front-end projects are generally more popular on GitHub. .
TOP10 projects with the most contributors
Note: The contributors here only include those who have a GitHub account, and developers whose email addresses are not registered with GitHub are not displayed
The more contributors, the more open the project is. Among the top ten projects with the largest number of contributors, Ali surprisingly occupies 8 seats, almost all of them, while Baidu occupies the remaining two. Ali's ant-design project topped the list again, including the derivative project ant-design-pro.
The number of contributors is one of the important indicators to reflect whether a project is open. The more open a project is, the more contributions it will accept from the community. The open source projects launched by companies need to pay special attention to this indicator, because some open source projects of companies only open source code, but the specific development and route evolution do not allow others to get involved.
We can see that Ali is aware of this problem and has made some improvements. We also expect more open source projects from domestic companies to embrace the community.
Top 10 projects with the most Commits
The more commits, the more complex the project, the longer the development cycle, and the larger the number of collaborators. Among the top ten commits, Ali has 5, Baidu has 3, and Tencent and Meituan each have one.
Here the author found a phenomenon: some large companies will fork some well-known third-party projects and create branches, but this is not reflected in the fork relationship of github, and most of them are Ali, such as the AliOS-nodejs project. In my opinion, this kind of behavior is not worth encouraging.
Among the Top10 projects, Baidu's Paddle and Apollo projects are among the best, which shows that Baidu's claim to build projects and products based on open source concepts in AI has fulfilled its own promises and deserves respect.
In addition, we found that 4 of these 10 projects are Apache Foundation projects (Flink was acquired by Ali), which shows that the Apache Foundation has a well-deserved reputation in open source, and also shows that domestic companies have indeed donated the best projects to Apache. foundation.
3. The company's open source situation
Which accounts are the most open source
In terms of open source accounts, the official accounts of major companies are not the accounts with the most open source projects. This crown was taken by Ali's Kissy gallery team because this account is the component library account of the Kissy front-end framework. It is a pity that the Kissy project is actually dead, and its active period was before 2015. At that time, the Kissy team can be said to be one of the earliest pioneers in China to use GitHub. They are certainly worthy of respect, but should Ali be responsible for these accounts? Do some cleanup?
How many stars do you know about the overall project
We made a distribution map of the number of stars of all companies' projects. We found that although Tencent's open source projects are few, only 130, they are of high quality. There are 97 projects with more than 100 stars, accounting for more than two-thirds of the total. ;Although Ali has many projects, there are only 237 projects with more than 100 Stars. This shows that Tencent is more cautious when dealing with open source, and the projects launched are all high-quality projects that are helpful to developers.
The most extreme company here is Huawei. Although it has 218 non-fork projects, there are only 14 projects with more than 100 Stars. The reason, on the one hand, is that Huawei mostly participates in third-party underlying projects as contributors, such as Linux, Kubernetes, etc., which are not reflected in the statistics; on the other hand, it also shows that Huawei has done a good job in its own open source projects. Not enough, its performance does not match Huawei's identity as an IT giant.
In what areas are companies strong?
We counted the TOP10 projects with the number of Stars in each company and classified them by field. we discover:
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Big front-end (front-end and mobile development) projects are the most, and the top 10 projects in Ali, Baidu, 360, and Meituan account for almost half of them. Tencent is the most exaggerated. 9 of the top 10 projects are in the field of big front-ends.
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Baidu has 4 projects in the AI field, which are unique among many companies, including Paddle and Apollo, which are more popular.
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Although Huawei has few projects, they are basically projects in the infrastructure field, such as ServiceComb, CarbonData, LiteOS, etc.
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Xiaomi has several popular OS-related projects.
Which company is most active in open source
The latest update time can indicate the activity level of the project. If the project has not been updated in the past year, it is likely that it is no longer maintained.
Here, we counted all the projects that were last updated within three months, and found that among these projects, Ali had the largest number of projects, with a total of 269, accounting for 48%, followed by Baidu, with 98, accounting for 18%. %.
GitHub's issue area provides a very good platform for developers to ask for help and collaborate and communicate, and the company's maintenance level of the project can be seen from the company's resolved issues.
Here we have counted the number of issues solved by companies in their history (that is, the number of issues closed), among which Ali has solved more than 60,000 issues, which is more than the sum of all subsequent companies. It's still very caring, and it's not the rumored "open source and then leave it alone".
Companies at the bottom of the rankings have yet to work on this.
4. Summary: The status quo of open source in Chinese companies
The above data provide us with some interesting perspectives to study the status quo of domestic open source. Among them, some data verify our previous views. For example, most of the excellent open source projects of most companies are front-end, because front-end groups are more active in the community , The front-end code is generally not too confidential, so the company is more open-minded.
On the other hand, some data are beyond our expectations. For example, Ali’s data ranks first in almost all categories, sometimes even the sum of other companies, and it also does a good job in terms of communityization/openness. .
Tencent has a small number of its own open source projects, which is also related to the fact that the company did not pay much attention to open source in the past. In recent years, Tencent has actively approached various open source foundations, and has also open sourced some high-quality projects, gaining a reputation among developers.
Huawei is somewhat conservative in terms of its own open source. It focuses more on participating in community open source. Many of its own open source projects are mostly related to operating systems.
And we can also see that individual people and teams can have a major impact on the open source of the entire company. For example, Yubo of Ali is not only the founder of Kissy, but also leads the team to develop and maintain ant-design, which supports the big open source of Ali. Flag; Baidu has echarts team; Tencent has Alloyteam; 360 has Qiwu Troupe, etc.
The bad thing is that these best Chinese Internet companies still have a big gap with foreign countries in the underlying key projects, such as ant-design/element, etc., which are just component libraries of front-end frameworks such as React and Vue, which are the core of their ecology. It is part of the system, and there are very few projects that are the core of the ecology in China. Therefore, domestic open source is only a lively look, and in terms of actual effect, there is a huge gap with foreign countries.
In addition, domestic companies have not made the best use of GitHub, and there is still a lack of open source governance. We have seen a large number of fork projects and a large number of empty projects. These projects should be cleaned up as soon as possible. For projects that are no longer maintained, GitHub also provides an archiving function, which domestic companies should make good use of.
Note:
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The account selected here is a company account/project account, or a department/team account, not a personal account.
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Some projects have been removed due to overlapping donations to the Apache Foundation, and only the data in Apache is kept.
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The deadline for data statistics is March 22, 2019, and subsequent data are not included.