Background
Open source software development is a global phenomenon where de-
velopers share their work for free for others to use, learn from, modify
and share. The way software is developed and shared is reminiscent of
the way scientific and academic works pull from, and contribute back to,
a global corpus of knowledge.
Aim
In this report, I analyse the activities of developers and their work on the
open source platform GitHub, looking for patterns that indicate a connec-
tion between open source software development and academic work.
Method
I present analysis of aggregated activity data from millions of developers
on GitHub, combined with metrics for economic prosperity and education
attainment to show correlations between prosperity, education and open
source software development.
Results and conclusion
I show that there are statistically significant correlations between eco-
nomic prosperity, education attainment and level of activity in open source
development for a given country. I further show that education attainment
in a country has an impact on the types of open source software created
by developers in that country. Inversely, I find that there is no correlation
between any of these factors and the choice of license for open source
software, developers worldwide vastly prefer permissive licenses for their
open source work.