The Geography of Open Source Software: Evidence from GitHub

Open Source Software plays an important role in the digital economy. Yet although software production is amenable to remote collaboration and its end products are easily shared across distances, software development seems to cluster geographically in places such as Silicon Valley, London, or Berlin. And while recent work indicates that positive effects of open source software production accrue locally through knowledge spillovers and information effects, up-to-date data on the geographic distribution of active open source developers remains limited. Here we analyze the geographic distribution of more than half a million active contributors to GitHub located in early 2021 at various spatial scales. Comparing our data with results from before 2010, we find a significant increase in the relative share of developers based in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, suggesting a more even spread of OSS developers globally. Within countries, however, we find significant concentration in regions, exceeding by some margin the concentration of workers in high-tech fields. We relate OSS activity to a number of social and technological indicators at both scales using a multiple regression framework. Despite the potential of OSS as a distributed mode of collaborative work, the data suggest that OSS activity remains highly localized.