Igalia: Mid-season Power Rankings
Let’s take a look at how the year is stacking up in terms of Open Source contributions. If this were an episode of Friends its title would be "The One With the Charts".
I’ve written before about how I have personally come to really appreciate the act of making a simple list of “things recently accomplished”. It’s always eye opening, and for me at least, usually therapeutic.
For me personally, it’s been super weird first half of the year and… I feel like I could use a nice list.
It's been a weird year, right?
I mean, not just for me personally, for all of us I guess, right?
Mass layoffs everywhere for a while, new shuffling of people we know from Google to Shopify, Mozilla to Google, Google to Igalia, Mozilla to Igalia, Mozilla to Apple, Google to Meta… Who’s on first? Third base!
LLMs are suddenly everywhere. All of the “big” CSS features people have been clamouring for forever are suddenly right here. HTML finally got <dialog> and now is getting a popover (via attributes). Apple’s got some funky XR glasses coming. There is suddenly significant renewed interest in two novel web engines. And that’s just some of the tech stuff.
So yeah… Let’s see what, if any, impacts all of this are having on the state of projects Igalia works on by looking at our commits so far this year… Note that Igalia's slice of the pie is separated in each of the charts for quick identification...
Quick disclaimers
All of these stats are based on commits publicly available through their respective gits. This is of course an imperfect measure for many reasons - some commits are huge, some are small. Some small commits are really hard while some large commits are easy, but verbose. Finally, the biggest challenge, even if we accept these metrics is mapping commits to organizations. We use a fairly elaborate system and many checkpoints - we collaborate annually with several of the projects to cross check these mappings. Still, you'll see lots of entries in these charts with just an individual's name. Often these are individual contractors or contributors, but sometimes it's just that we cannot currently map them some other way. If you see one that should be counted differently, please let me know!
The Big Web Projects
Igalia is still the one (and still having fun) with the most commits in Chromium and WebKit after Google and Apple, respectively, as we'll see... But we can add some more #1’s this year - even some where we’re not excluding the steward…
Chromium
Igalia claims a whopping 41.9% of the (non-Google) commits so far in 2023!! That’s more than Microsoft, Intel, Opera, Samsung and ARM combined!!! Yowza!
data
Top 10 contributors
| Contributor | Contributions |
|---|---|
| Igalia | 41.56% |
| Microsoft | 16.42% |
| Intel | 11.74% |
| Opera | 4.88% |
| Ho Cheung | 3.92% |
| Samsung | 2.08% |
| Stephan Hartmann | 1.62% |
| ARM | 1.58% |
| Naver Corporation | 1.48% |
| Bytedance | 1.12% |
| 127 other committers | 14% |
As you read the others, keep in mind that the chromium repository actually has more than chrome inside it, so comparisons of these aren't Apples-to-Apples (or, Googles or foxes).
WebKit
52.6% of the non-Apple commits in WebKit so far this year are from Igalians. It's interesting to note that a huge 4.9% of all of these are from accounts with less than 10 commits this year - pretty close to what it was in Firefox!
data
Top 10 contributors
| Contributor | Contributions |
|---|---|
| Igalia | 54.94% |
| Sony | 18.29% |
| Ahmad Saleem | 8.81% |
| Red Hat | 5.50% |
| Rose | 2.69% |
| open-tec.co.jp | 1.96% |
| warlow.dev | 1.91% |
| umich.edu | 0.62% |
| Alexey Knyazev | 0.51% |
| 0.45% | |
| 40 other committers | 4% |
Firefox
We're sitting at the #5 spot (excluding Mozilla) with 8.87% of commits. Firefox is, in a lot of ways, the trickiest to describe, but just look at it: It's very diverse! As the inventors of modern open source, I guess it makes sense. The mozilla-central repository has the most indidivual significant contributors as well as a really long line of tiny contributors. The tiny contributors (less than 10 commits) contributed 5.2% (compared to 4.85% in WebKit, for example). However, there are also a few external contributors who are just astoundingly profilfic (some of these bigger slices represent hundreds of commits) and such a number of significant indivial contributors, it amounts to a lot.
data
Top 10 contributors
| Contributor | Contributions |
|---|---|
| André Bargull | 14.38% |
| Red Hat | 12.31% |
| Birchill | 10.32% |
| Gregory Pappas | 9.04% |
| Igalia | 8.87% |
| Robert Longson | 5.12% |
| CanadaHonk | 4.28% |
| Masatoshi Kimura | 2.65% |
| ganna | 2.21% |
| Itiel | 1.68% |
| 174 other committers | 29% |
Pause for a Note
When you look at these charts, it's really heartening to see how many people and organizations care and contribute. Especially when you look at the Mozilla/Firefox example, it really gives the impression that that project is just a million volunteers. But, it's important to keep it all in perspective too. WebKit has about 50 contributing orgs and individuals, Chrome about 140 and Firefox about 185. A lot more significant a % of contributions come from individuals in Mozilla. Importantly: In all of these projects, the steward org's contributions absolutely dwarf the rest of the world's contributions combined:
If you think this is astounding, please check out my post Webrise and our Web Ecosystem Health series on the Igalia Chats Podcast
Wolvic
A new #1 in the reports. I guess it should come as no suprise at all that we're #1 in terms of commits to our Wolvic XR browser. It looks at lot like other projects in terms of the steward's balance. What's more interesting, I think, is that its funding model is based on partnerships with several organizations and a collective rather than Igalia as a "go it alone" source.
data
Top 10 contributors
| Contributor | Contributions |
|---|---|
| Igalia | 94.90% |
| opensuse.org | 0.77% |
| ratcliffefamily.org | 0.77% |
| gallegonovato | 0.51% |
| net-c.ca | 0.51% |
| Ayaskant Panigrahi | 0.51% |
| Anushka Chakraborty | 0.26% |
| Ana2k | 0.26% |
| Luna Jernberg | 0.26% |
| zohocorp.com | 0.26% |
Servo
This year, thanks to some new funding and internal investment we can add Servo to a very special #1 list! Igalia is second to no one in terms of commits there either with 52.7% of all commits! An amazing 22.24% of those commits in servo are from unmappable committers with less than 10 commits so far this year!
data
Top 10 contributors
| Contributor | Contributions |
|---|---|
| Igalia | 52.68% |
| Mozilla | 25.92% |
| sagudev | 5.11% |
| Pu Xingyu | 2.73% |
| michaelgrigoryan25 | 2.02% |
| Alex Touchet | 1.66% |
| 2shiori17 | 1.55% |
| cybai (Haku) | 1.19% |
| Yutaro Ohno | 0.71% |
| switchpiggy | 0.59% |
| 30 other committers | 6% |
Test-262
Test-262 is the conformance test suite for ECMA work (JavaScript). I guess you could say we're doing a lot of work there as well, because guess who's got the most commits there? If you guessed Igalia, you'd be right, with 53.4% of all commits!
data
Top 10 contributors
| Contributor | Contributions |
|---|---|
| Igalia | 53.64% |
| 11.26% | |
| Justin Grant | 10.60% |
| Richard Gibson | 3.97% |
| André Bargull | 3.31% |
| Jordan Harband | 3.31% |
| Bocoup | 3.31% |
| Veera | 2.65% |
| Huáng Jùnliàng | 1.99% |
| José Julián Espina | 1.32% |
Note that total number of commits in Test262 is comparatively rather small as compared to many of the other projects here.
Babel
Igalians are now the #1 contributors to Babel, contributing 46.6% of all commits so far this year!
data
Top 10 contributors
| Contributor | Contributions |
|---|---|
| Igalia | 46.35% |
| Huáng Jùnliàng | 22.32% |
| liuxingbaoyu | 19.31% |
| Jonathan Browne | 0.86% |
| Avery | 0.86% |
| fisker Cheung | 0.86% |
| Dimitri Papadopoulos Orfanos | 0.43% |
| FabianWarnecke | 0.43% |
| Abdulaziz Ghuloum | 0.43% |
| magic-akari | 0.43% |
V8
Igalia is the #7 contributor to V8 (exclulding Google)! This is a pretty busy repo and it's interesting that 6.36% of these commits are from the unmapped/individual contributors with less than ten commits so far this year.
data
Top 10 contributors
| Contributor | Contributions |
|---|---|
| 85.66% | |
| Red Hat | 2.98% |
| Intel | 2.57% |
| loongson.cn | 2.09% |
| iscas.ac.cn | 1.66% |
| Microsoft | 1.13% |
| ARM | 0.86% |
| Igalia | 0.79% |
| Bytedance | 0.41% |
| eswincomputing.com | 0.34% |
Google's contributions account for a giant 87.5% of all commits here as well.
But that's not all!
All of the above is just looking specifically at the big web projects because, you know, the web is sort of my thing. If you're reading my blog, there's a pretty good chance it's your thing too. But Igalia does way more than that, if you can believe it. I probably don't talk about it enough, but it's pretty amazing. I suppose I can't give a million more charts, but here are just a few more highlights of other notable projects and specifications where Igalia has been playing a big role... (Keep in mind that specifications move a lot more slowly and so have generally far less commits)
- HTML: Igalians were #3 among contribtor commits to HTML with 8.94% so far this year (behind Google and Apple).
- Web Assembly: Igalia is the #3 contributor to Web Assembly with 8.75% of the commits so far this year!
- ARIA: So far this year, Igalia is the #1 contributor to the ARIA repo with 19.4% of commits!
- NativeScript: Igalia is currently the #1 contributor so far this year to the NativeScript repository with 58.3% of all commits!
- GStreamer GStreamer is widely used and powerful open source multimedia framework. Igalia is the #2 contributor there!
- VK-GL-CTS: The official Kronos OpenGL and Vulkan conformance test suite (graphics). It would be a massive understatement to say that Igalia has been a major contributor: We're the #1 contributor there with 31.1% of all commits.
- Mesa: The Mesa 3D Graphics Library is huge and contains open source implementations of pretty much every graphical standard (Vulkan, as mentioned above, for example). Igalia is the #5 contributor there so far this year, contributing 6.62% of all commits.
- Piglit: Piglit is an open-source test suite for OpenGL implementations. Igalia is the #5 contributor there with 6.86%
Wrapping up...
It's always amazing to me to look at the data. I hope it's interesting to others too. There are, of course, lots of reasons that all of the committers do what they do, but ultimately, open source development and maintenance benefits us all. The reason that Igalia is able to do all of this is that we are funded by a diverse array of clients making things downstream with needs.
You know where to find us...