Geographic Diversity in Public Code Contributions

TL;DR

This study analyzes 50 years of public code commits to understand geographic diversity among contributors, revealing increasing global participation and historical shifts influenced by socio-political factors.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale, longitudinal analysis of geographic diversity in public code contributions, using innovative geolocation methods over 50 years.

Findings

North America dominated early contributions

European contributions increased over time

Global diversity in code contributions has steadily grown

Abstract

We conduct an exploratory, large-scale, longitudinal study of 50 years of commits to publicly available version control system repositories, in order to characterize the geographic diversity of contributors to public code and its evolution over time. We analyze in total 2.2 billion commits collected by Software Heritage from 160 million projects and authored by 43 million authors during the 1971-2021 time period. We geolocate developers to 12 world regions derived from the United Nation geoscheme, using as signals email top-level domains, author names compared with names distributions around the world, and UTC offsets mined from commit metadata.We find evidence of the early dominance of North America in open source software, later joined by Europe. After that period, the geographic diversity in public code has been constantly increasing. We also identify relevant historical shifts related to the UNIX wars, the increase of coding literacy in Central and South Asia, and broader phenomena like colonialism and people movement across countries (immigration/emigration).