Google’s love for open source has never been a secret. Though I once made the mistake of taking Google director Chris DiBona to task for not doing even more, the reality is that no company contributes more to open source than Google. This was underlined by new data from the Open Source Contributor Index (OCSI), which found that in July 2022, Google moved past Microsoft in the total number of employees contributing to open source projects on GitHub.
Of course, that’s just data for GitHub, which doesn’t include big projects like Drupal. It may also depend on employees self-identifying with their corporate email addresses or simple repository hygiene. Yes, yes, and yes. But those aren’t the best questions to be asking about open source contribution data. The real question is whether open source contributions matter at all.