Growth

Growth plays an important role in the development of projects and the greater ecosystem. We can detect some emerging topics by examining the growth rates of stars over the last year. The topic of green software is growing in popularity, also known as “green computing”. Its concern is the lowering of energy consumption, carbon intensity, and environmental impact of programming languages and applications. With over 97% of the world’s applications now using open source, this clearly affects energy usage and efficiency worldwide.¹

Projects like Kepler, kube-green, Scaphandre, Cloud Carbon Footprint, Software Carbon Intensity Specification, and CodeCarbon demonstrating the growth within this new topic. This trend is partially driven by new collaborative communities, such as the Green Software Foundation, which is supported by major software companies. The ambitious climate targets of companies like Google and Microsoft may be a contributing factor to this trend. Levels of access and participation may also play a role, as green software typically has a lower barrier to entry for general software developers than other topics.

Tip

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Fig. 20 - The 40 projects with highest star growth

Another way to look at project growth is in relation to total commits over the past year. The number of commits created within a given timeframe highly depends on the project type. For example, a web platform with a large codebase tends to go hand-in-hand with a high volume of commits compared with projects centred on data analysis. Meanwhile, software tools that are dependencies of many other projects are more likely to see a high frequency of commits and sustained growth, as there is an incentive to maintain the codebase to avoid bugs and breaking changes. However, for this reason, high growth can also be considered a risk. Within this ecosystem, both relatively young and large, widely known projects can be seen with high commit growth. These include xclim, a library of derived climate variables; InVEST, an Natural Capital Project model used to “map and value the goods and services from nature that sustain and fulfil human life”; and Energy Sparks, which is designed to help schools improve their energy efficiency. However, as with other growth metrics, this metric can be misleading for a number of reasons and may not reflect the quality of growth.

Fig. 21 - The 40 projects with highest commit growth