As Google downsizes, so does its open source work

In early May, Google reportedly laid off developers working on Dart and Flutter, two popular open source frameworks. The layoffs happened just weeks before Google I/O, the company's big annual developer conference. It's timing left some wondering if Google was in the midst of a pullback from the open source community.

According to data from the Open Source Contributor Index, a project that tracks open source activity on GitHub by commercial organizations, Google's contributors are on pace to be the company's lowest since 2020. OSCI uses publicly available data to measures the number of active contributors — defined as anyone who makes more than ten commits to public GitHub projects — and the organizations they are affiliated with. In April, the number of open source contributors at Google nudged down to 3,640, a decline of 10% compared to the same time last year.

Google stands out among its peers. Of the top ten companies¹ by active contributors so far this year, Google is the only one with a year-over-year decline.

Despite the downward trend, open source activity remains substantially higher than pre-pandemic levels. Moreover, Google still has time to get back on track; large jumps in contributor activity in late 2021 turned that year into a blockbuster.

Artificial intelligence also stands to jumpstart open source work across many big tech companies. Among Google's top five repositories by contributor count, four are related to machine learning².

‍

^{1. Microsoft, Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Amazon, GitHub, SAP, Huawei, Nvidia}

^{2. PyTorch/XLA, OpenXLA/XLA, TensorFlow/TensorFlow, Google/JAX}