GitHub has released its 2022 Octoverse report, covering an exploration of open source software, including its impact on the world and companies; and content on key trends affecting software development. The report quotes Wolfgang Gehring, Mercedes-Benz’s FOSS ambassador for technological innovation, saying, “Today, you can’t develop software without open source.”

When we released our first Octoverse report 10 years ago to celebrate reaching 2.8 million users on GitHub, we couldn’t predict the impact open source would have on the world.

In 2012, most enterprises used only open source software (OSS) to run their web servers — even though Red Hat achieved a $1 billion valuation; other key high-profile projects, such as Kubernetes and Docker, have yet to be released.

Today, we live in a very different world.

The report explores “What kind of impact has open source really had on the world and how is it changing businesses?”, and found three megatrends to watch:

• The Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL), Shell, and Go programming languages ​​are heavily used by developers in 2022, indicating that Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices are increasingly being adopted by projects on GitHub, including open source projects.HCL was the fastest growing language on GitHub at 56.1%; this growth was driven by the popularity of Terraform tools for IaC.The report states,The popularity of these tools also demonstrates the growing presence of operational communities in the open source space,The growing role of operations in open source development.

• Big tech companies build large open source communities.Some of the biggest open source projects on GitHub in 2022 have commercial support. These investments also contribute to feedback loops: companies are creating new OSS communities, which is forcing other organizations to launch Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) to coordinate OSS strategies—encouraging more people to contribute to open source. By one estimate, more than 30% of Fortune 100 companies now have OSPOs, and this number is expected to continue to increase.

• First-time OSS contributors favor projects with commercial support,It mostly occurs among developers who are not part of a commercially supported project organization. This underscores the importance of commercially supported open source projects in developing the wider ecosystem and the brand awareness these projects bring, the report said. From Flutter to Next.JS, from React to VS Code, company-led open source projects have become an integral part of the developer ecosystem on GitHub. 50% of first-time contributors work on commercially supported projects.

Some other findings include:

• JavaScript remains the most used language on GitHub. In 2022, PHP usage will decline, while Python usage will grow by 22.5%. Python is the second most used language, followed by Java and TypeScript.
• 94 million developers are using GitHub.
• The Rust community has grown by over 50%.
• Over 90% of companies use open source.
• 90% of Fortune 100 companies use GitHub.
• 413 million open source contributions in 2022.
• More than 20.5 million people joined the site this year, with India seeing the fastest growth in the number of developers.

See the full report for more details.