Github Has Surpassed Sourceforge and Google Code in Popularity

Github is now the most popular open source forge, having surpassed Sourceforge, Google Code and Microsoft’s CodePlex in total number of commits for the period of January to May 2011, according to data released today by Black Duck Software. This should probably come as no surprise, but it’s good to have data to back assumptions.

During the period Black Duck examined, Github had 1,153,059 commits, Sourceforge had 624,989, Google Code and 287,901 and CodePlex had 49,839.

Black Duck also found that C++ and Java were the most popular languages for commits in these forges during this period of time.

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Black Duck didn’t look at language specific forges such as RubyForge, and it excluded shell, XML and assembler commits.

The most popular languages were:

1. C++ (362,077 commits)
2. Java (335,992 commits)
3. Python (296,896 commits)
4. C (264,468 commits)
5. JavaScript (251,557 commits)
6. Ruby (234,980 commits)
7. PHP (154,250 commits)
8. C# (125,848 commits)
9. Perl (89,720 commits)

Here’s how the langauges broke down on a forge by forge basis:

Source: Black Duck Software

RedMonk co-founder and analyst Stephen O’Grady points to the percentage of C# commits in GitHub as a key indicator of the forge’s popularity. As expected, the largest number of C# commits were in CodePlex – 35.3% of them. But GitHub was close behind with 31.9%. O’Grady described this as a “warping effect” caused by the GitHub’s sheer number of GitHub commits.

Source: Black Duck Software

Update: O’Grady has released a slide deck on the subject of Github as the new center of gravity for open source development.

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