Authors
Johannes Wachs, Mariusz Nitecki, William Schueller, Axel Polleres
Publication date
2022/3/1
Journal
Technological Forecasting and Social Change
Volume
176
Pages
121478
Publisher
North-Holland
Description
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 digital, software development seems to cluster geographically in places like Silicon Valley, London, or Berlin. And while OSS activity creates positive externalities which accrue locally through knowledge spillovers and information effects, up-to-date data on the geographic distribution of open source developers is limited. This presents a significant blindspot for policymakers, who often 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 …
Total citations
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Scholar articles
J Wachs, M Nitecki, W Schueller, A Polleres - Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2022