'Most open-source software code writers from product firms'

Notwithstanding that ITes companies have the highest number of software engineers, major contribution towards open-source code writing is made by developers in product firms like Amazon, while services firms like TCS and Cognizant are fast catching up, says a survey.
According to the survey by talent acquisition startup Belong, Amazon had the highest number of registered users on Github, followed by Cognizant, TCS and Microsoft.
The survey covered 75,000 Indian engineers that have a presence on GitHub - one of the largest communities where software developers host and review code.
The report said most of the top 200 contributors do not work for the big brands. As many as 67 per cent of the top 200 contributors work for product and service companies with less than 200 employees, indicating that hiring for quality developers does not equate to sourcing from big names.

"Defying all trends and myths, we found that most of the top 200 contributors came from tier 2 universities. Less than 14 per cent came from premier institutions such as IITs, NITs and BITS," the report said.
The report further said while women take up 26 per cent of tech jobs in India, the percentage of women active on open- source in the country is just 6 per cent. Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco and Thoughtworks have the highest female open-source contributors.

The survey further noted that open-source culture is of key importance for tech companies to attract the best developers.
"In 1990s and early 2000s, organisations used to have more of a patent driven IP protectionist culture. Today, we are seeing big companies open source some of their hard-core IP and innovations," said Belong's CTO Vinodh Kumar Ravindranath.

Ravindranath noted that "to attract the best talent, it is no longer enough to say what you have done or even show the final product. Through open-source, organisations are revealing the kind of technology they have built and the people working on the problem in a bid to woo all relevant top-notch talent into their teams".