China is emerging as a major force in the global open-source community with a growing number of developers and widely adopted projects such as DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence (AI) models, according to industry experts.
The country was home to more than 2.2 million active open-source developers last year, making it the deepest pool of active open-source contributors, Ke Meng, a member of OSS Compass, said at the annual Open Atom Open-Source Ecosystem Conference in Beijing on Wednesday.
Together with India’s 2 million-odd contributors, the two countries were key engines of talent growth in the global open-source ecosystem, underscoring the eastward shift in market development, according to OSS Compass, which provides data research tools and insights to gauge the health of open-source projects.
There were 1.9 million active open-source developers in the European Union and 1.7 million in the US, according to its estimates.
The level of contribution from China to global open-source projects grew more than 10 times between 2015 and 2024, according to an OpenRank research published in April. Contributions from the US almost plateaued during that decade, it added.
