On Mon, Jun 04, 2018 at 06:06:33PM +0100, Mark Rousell wrote:

[cut]

>
> I don't want to get into an argument about this as I am not exactly a
> fan of Microsoft but...
>
> My statement that MS were the largest single contributor on GitHub comes
> from GitHub's own statistics specifically for *open source*
> contributions (admittedly dating from 2016).
>
> Source: http://businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-open-source-2016-9
> 'Microsoft just edged out Facebook and proved that it's changed in an
> important way'.
>

You've been confused by marketing, again. By reading through the very
same source used by the article you are citing with an unbiased eye,
it becomes clear that what is happening is that Microsoft's vscode
repository (yes, just *one* repository) is the first GitHub repository
for number of contributors:

https://octoverse.github.com/

This is what the journalist "mis-read" and "mis-cited" in the article
you mentioned. And this does not make MS the largest single
contributor to GitHub, only the project initiator who got the largest
number of contributors (about 15000) to one of its projects. And the
contributions to that repo belong to the 15000 contributors, not to
Microsoft (unless the journalist is implying that most of those 15000
contributors are Microsoft employees themselves, which wouldn't be
surprising at all). Then there are about 25.000.000 other active
repositories and about 26.000.000 more active users on
GitHub.

Biased marketing has a strange way of putting numbers together,
indeed...

HND

KatolaZ

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