Comment by Illniyar

9 years ago

How is that calculated?

I mean Microsoft only has 2561 members (https://github.com/orgs/Microsoft/people) , so it isn't how many microsoft members contribute to open source.

Is it how many contributors their open source projects have? nope, FontAwesome has maybe 100 contributors to all of it's 5 projects but it's listed as having 9000+ contributors.

From what I can gather it's mostly based on the number of people that forked one of their projects (with some padding, maybe by the number of contributors to forks of the project? I have no idea)

This doesn't seem like a metric that is more meaningful then just the number of stars a repository has.

Microsoft also has:

https://github.com/azure

https://github.com/OfficeDev

https://github.com/mspnp

https://github.com/dotnet

https://github.com/aspnet

https://github.com/powershell

https://github.com/nuget - not sure this counts

plus probable another 100 i'm not aware of.

omg, it's based on "the number of unique contributors (users who pushed code, opened or commented on an issue or PR)" (from https://octoverse.github.com/#open-source).

So if I open sourced a buggy project, and someone reported a bug by opening an issue, and then 100 other people commented on that issue, my project would have 101 contributors!

2561 members are the ones who made Microsoft org show up on their GitHub profile. By default, GitHub does not list your orgs on your profile. And many people are simply not aware of this, because your profile page looks different to you and others. You don't realize this until you visit your profile from incognito window or something.

The actual people count in https://github.com/orgs/Microsoft/people is twice as much. (I can see the actual number because I'm in the org.)

  • Oh, I didn't know that.

    But it's still obvious that this is not the metric that was used.

One method that comes to mind would be checking commit authors' e-mail addresses. Someone with @microsoft.com e-mail would very likely be an employee of MSFT.