State of Open Source Usage Q2 2023: The Scarf Report

We are pleased to present our Q2 2023 quarterly report on open-source software adoption and growth, courtesy of data obtained from Scarf users. At present, Scarf is monitoring downloads for more than 2500 open-source software projects. These projects are backed by esteemed companies and organizations worldwide, including the CNCF, Apache Foundation, and Linux Foundation, among others. This second report of 2023 aims to showcase the changes and growth observed in the past two quarters.

A comparison between Q4 2022 and Q1 2023 revealed a 60% surge in overall downloads, a trend that maintained its momentum with a 61% increase between Q1 and Q2 2023. This past quarter alone witnessed over 340 million downloads from over three million unique global sources (end-points).

Remarkably, 74.8% of the Fortune 500 companies consistently downloaded open-source software, escalating to 79% when considering the reading of open-source project documentation. This quarter, Microsoft, followed by Cisco and Amazon, were the top companies downloading open-source software. Additionally, Cisco, Microsoft, and Apple engineers were the leading consumers of documentation and content from open-source projects. Although the order shifted between Q1 and Q2, most companies remained the same. However, Disney, JB Hunt, General Motors, and Capital One were replaced by Tesla, Wells Fargo, FedEx, and AT&T in the top 10.

On a global scale, Singapore experienced the most growth with an impressive 370% spike in Q2 downloads. Belgium, for the second consecutive quarter, was among the top three countries for open-source software growth, displaying a 370% surge over Q1 numbers. This follows a 242% growth from Q4 to Q1. In contrast, Russia, which previously had the fastest growth, experienced a significant 44% decrease in download traffic.

In Q2, the US accounted for nearly 32% of all download traffic, followed by Ireland at 15.9%, and Germany at 12.9%. This quarter, we assessed which container registries were the most popular for pulling containers. While Docker Hub accounted for 53% of the pulls, Github Container Registry showed promising growth with 41% of pull traffic. In contrast, Quay, AWS’s ECR, Google’s GCR, Gitlab Container Registry, and others collectively contributed less than 6% of overall traffic for open-source projects tracked by Scarf.

Important notes: 

This quarter, we enhanced our data quality and matching algorithms, which led to certain adjustments in previously collected and reported data. 

To maintain true quarter-over-quarter growth comparisons, we omitted any packages newly tracked by Scarf in the last quarter, thus focusing on the growth of packages already tracked since Q1.

_All increases are based on the packages using Scarf for analytics.  As of the time of the report, this is around 2500 open-source packages/projects.

In this context, an end point is a unique server or user that has downloaded software this quarter._