Understanding the impact of COVID-19 on github developers: A preliminary study

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has impact almost every aspect of human lives profoundly. This paper investigates the impact of COVID-19 on the activity and contribution of open source software (OSS) developers. Specifically, we make great efforts to harvest the information of all the developers (over 25 million) on GitHub and their contribution activities. With such a large-scale dataset, we perform analysis from four perspectives, including the overall ecosystem level, country level, organization level and developer level, to characterize the impact of COVID-19 on the OSS community. We have revealed a number of interesting observations and trends, which are crucial to understanding the OSS contributors and supporting the collaboration to combat global crisis like COVID-19.