State of Open Source Usage: The Scarf Report 2023
Published
March 5, 2024
This article was originally posted on
HackernoonLast year we published our first aggregated report on open source usage data on Scarf and since then we’ve been pleased to see Scarf data cited by others, whether discussing open source or advocating for it. This latest edition of The Scarf Report covers the quarterly numbers for Q4 2023, as well as 2023 in its entirety.
Overall Open Source Usage in Q4 and 2023
Q4 2023 saw a 176 million increase in OSS downloads compared to Q3 2023, a 40% increase. This was paired with an increase of 800,000 unique origins
, (Scarf’s closest approximation of a unique downloader of software) compared to the previous quarter.
Over the course of 2023, Scarf tracked a total of 1.6 billion OSS downloads from 15.4 million unique origins
. Monthly uniques roughly doubled from the start to end of the year.
Open Source Software Usage across Fortune 500 Companies
In the last quarter of 2023, top Fortune 500 companies heavily involved in open-source software included Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Cisco. In Q4 alone, we identified 470 organizations engaging with OSS through Scarf.
A few companies that consistently ranked in the Top 10 for OSS usage throughout the year, we observed:
- Apple
- Cisco
- Oracle
- Microsoft
- Disney
- IBM
With 94% of the Fortune 500 seen interacting with open source software tracked with Scarf in Q4 2023, data from Scarf serves as compelling and concrete evidence that open source is critical to enterprises globally. This is also further evidence that Scarf and approaches like it can uncover commercial open source usage that would otherwise go unreported.
Regional Usage of Open Source Software
Open source usage is global, but looking at the geographical statistics of Scarf downloads continues to show interesting results and trends. Significant growth in certain regions can be attributed to a number of potential factors: increased traction of Scarf itself, increased regional traction of particular projects that use Scarf, or increase in regional popularity of open source as a whole.
Open Source Usage in the Public Sector
Scarf data shows that governments around the world leverage open source for application development and day to day operations. All IP addresses are tagged with a `connection_type`
, representing if the internet connection belongs to an ISP, a business, a hosting provider, an educational institution or a government organization. Analyzing the unique organizations on `government`
connection types give a unique view into the public sector adoption of open source worldwide.
Container Registries
While Scarf tracks downloads of various artifact types, the most popular kind of artifact container images. Container downloads on Scarf have surfaced the rapid rise to prominence of GitHub Container Registry, but Docker Hub remains the dominant container registry by a wide margin, still receiving twice as much volume of pulls on Scarf.
Over the course of the year, the share of artifacts pulled through Scarf from Docker Hub has continued to increase, with its share of pulls increasing 16% between the first and last quarter of the year.
Our Takeaways
As large organizations in both the private and public sector increase their reliance on open source, opportunities for successful commercialization of open source software also becomes increasingly achievable. We are confident that this upward trajectory will foster innovation, growth, and expansion within the open source community.
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