# The Open Source World Is Being Rebuilt From the Global South

> We pulled GitHub's raw Innovation Graph data for 24 quarters. Here's what the numbers actually say about who is building the open source world — and it's not what the headlines told you.

Source: https://theaidaily.in/analysis/github-global-south.html
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Every year, GitHub publishes its Octoverse report with a tidy narrative about which countries are "fastest-growing." Every year, the tech press summarises it and moves on. We did something different: we pulled the raw quarterly CSV from GitHub's Innovation Graph — their public, unmediated dataset of developer counts by economy from 2020 to 2025 — and ran the numbers ourselves.

What we found is sharper, stranger, and more consequential for business leaders than anything the headlines said.

## The short version

Between 2020 and 2025, the global open source developer base on GitHub more than tripled. But that growth was not evenly distributed. A cluster of Global South economies — India, Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam, Mexico — each grew 5× or more in five years. The established Western economies grew roughly 3×. And China, the world's second-largest economy, grew just 1.9×.

Country | 2020 Q1 | 2025 Q4 | Multiple

🇮🇳 India | 4.2M | 24.6M | 5.9×

🇮🇩 Indonesia | 0.9M | 4.9M | 5.6×

🇧🇷 Brazil | 1.4M | 7.7M | 5.5×

🇻🇳 Vietnam | 0.5M | 2.8M | 5.5×

🇲🇽 Mexico | 0.5M | 2.6M | 4.9×

🇩🇪 Germany | 1.3M | 4.9M | 3.7×

🇬🇧 United Kingdom | 1.6M | 5.2M | 3.2×

🇺🇸 United States | 9.8M | 30.3M | 3.1×

🇨🇳 China | 5.9M | 11.1M | 1.9×

Every top-growth economy is in the Global South. Every slow-growth economy is either the established West — or China.

## India: the inflection is visible, and we can date it

India's growth story is known. What is not known — because no one has published it from the raw data — is the exact quarter the trajectory changed.

**The crossover moment**
Before Q4 2022: India exceeded the US in quarterly net developer adds **zero times** across 10 consecutive quarters. After Q4 2022: India exceeded the US in 8 of 13 quarters — and in every single quarter from mid-2024 onward. Q4 2022 is October–December 2022. ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022.