Microsoft is now the leading company for open source contributions on GitHub

How is that calculated?<p>I mean Microsoft only has 2561 members (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;orgs&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;people" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;orgs&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;people</a>) , so it isn&#x27;t how many microsoft members contribute to open source.<p>Is it how many contributors their open source projects have? nope, FontAwesome has maybe 100 contributors to all of it&#x27;s 5 projects but it&#x27;s listed as having 9000+ contributors.<p>From what I can gather it&#x27;s mostly based on the number of people that forked one of their projects (with some padding, maybe by the number of contributors to forks of the project? I have no idea)<p>This doesn&#x27;t seem like a metric that is more meaningful then just the number of stars a repository has.

This is very good, with this I learned that it&#x27;s never too late to a company change. A very slow and large company like MS took decades to make this change, but they did well. And, they do that not because they are &quot;good guys&quot;, but because this is the strategy to make them grow on their business. They are thinking on themselves.

AFAIK Angular is part of Google.<p>But a quite decent improvement from the era when the company bribed government officials to purchase bulk licences for pupils and govn&#x27;t, distorting the job market. This is a less harmful Microsoft than it was 5-10-20 years ago.

This is quite an improvement from the olden days when a certain Microsoft executive described the GPL as a cancer, and open source in general as a thing to avoid

When I was a script kiddie back in the mid nineties Microsoft was this evil corporate empire that all the linux kids hated.<p>Now I&#x27;m in my mid 30s and I respect them a lot and would definitely work for them.<p>I guess we both have changed.

Let&#x27;s discuss Microsoft&#x27;s software patents.<p>Any Github contributions they make are trivial in comparison.

It seems to me like they are only open sourcing the products they wish more people are using, and not their actually useful products like MSOffice and the Windows OS.<p>Edit: to be clear, I know it is in their best interest not to open source those products, because that&#x27;s where most of their money comes from. But it really looks to me like the want to flood the market with random open source stuff, so that they seem more open source friendly. But in reality they are not actually contributing anything very useful to the community.

I reached a similar conclusion regarding Microsoft, based upon my own analysis:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gh-impact.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-most-influential-organizations-on-github.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gh-impact.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-most-influential-organizat...</a><p>Despite being a latecomer to GitHub, Microsoft has risen to become the 4th most influential organization on GitHub in a very short amount of time.

And I&#x27;m guessing they&#x27;re even still not counting the Xamarin employees?

I&#x27;ve been using dotnetcore to prototype a project. I&#x27;m actually really impressed with it. Every time I build and run it on Linux I&#x27;m resurprised that the project started in Visual Studio and builds &#x2F; runs on Linux. Neat stuff, now they just need to add support LDAP.<p>This is all coming from someone who only uses Windows for Overwatch, Office, and courses that require it.

Great - did they stop suing linux users yet?

Leaving aside the obvious methodology issues, whenever such a huge company starts using a third party extensively I start worrying that they will buy them and lay waste to the values of the original company. At least we&#x27;ll have GitLab and the like.

Ballmer 2005: Let&#x27;s kick open source&#x27;s ass<p>(Many years of confusion, a realization that no company has the engineering chops to pull off such a feat, stagnant stock price, CEO change..)<p>Nadella 2015: Let&#x27;s kiss open source&#x27;s ass

Let the meaningless metrics wars begin.

Microsoft is definitely trying to change its perception among the people, from hardcore closed box to trying to be the typical silicon valley company which opensources time to time to entice engineers working for them and yeah, greater good of the community.<p>But, as you see if you add Angular and Google&#x27;s contributions, Google leads the list by a margin. So this looks more like a PR exercise and since when did we start taking BI articles on tech seriously(no offence to any readers).

I have a feeling Microsoft will open source Windows soon.

Docker has 14,000+ employees?

If the article did the math to add Angular + Google, it would make them the top by a long shot.

It&#x27;s a bit different when a corporation open sources their product because it brings them more business value than a corporation actually contributes to not their open source projects. Does MS do that?

Let&#x27;s note that the analysis was done on Google BigQuery&#x27;s GitHub public dataset

Yet they are <i>still</i> opposed to user freedom on computers. Microsoft hasn&#x27;t changed.

Probably it&#x27;s only a short term statistics.

Too little; Too late;

GPL and Open Source are still a cancer purely from Business perspective especially on a short term perspective. This is exactly Steve Ballmer too, he is a business guy running a tech organization. He generated huge profits. Satya Nadella is a technical guy, who had seen the benefits of OSS tools, languages and platforms to know how they impact both the developer mindshare &amp; long-term company perspective

As long as key components like the official Microsoft NTFS implementation remain closed source, I see in this open source policy as a charade.

Good for them. I use exactly 0 lines of code from them. Seriously, who cares?