The Geography of Open Source Software: Evidence from GitHub

Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) plays an important role in the digital economy. Yet although software production is amenable to remote collaboration and its outputs 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 OSS activity creates positive externalities which accrue locally through knowledge spillovers and information effects, up-to-date data on the geographic distribution of active open source developers is limited. This presents a significant blindspot for policymakers, who tend to promote OSS at the national level as a cost-saving tool for public sector institutions. We address this gap by geolocating more than half a million active contributors to GitHub in early 2021 at various spatial scales. Compared to results from 2010, we find a significant increase in the 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 the concentration of workers in high-tech fields. Social and economic development indicators predict at most half of regional variation in OSS activity in the EU, suggesting that clusters of OSS have idiosyncratic roots. We argue that policymakers seeking to foster OSS should focus locally rather than nationally, using the tools of cluster policy to support networks of OSS developers.