Andy recently blogged the developer numbers from his OpenStreetMap Futures talk at SOTM US.

Wanting to play with the numbers myself, I took the osm100 code and added in additional projects. The original list of repos came from a list of “Core Software” from the Engineering Working Group, and since then some of the software has been replaced, and there’s other older software which used to be core, but isn’t.

The big changes were

• JOSM plugins

  These serve as an easier entry into JOSM programming, and have far more committers than JOSM core

• Taginfo

  Taginfo is now a core part of OSM, being used for auto-complete in iD

• Osmium and Libosmium

  Osmium and Libosmium run behind the scenes for a lot of OSM software. This probably didn’t add many more people, as most developers wouldn’t start here.

• Old Mapnik Stylesheets

  These had a lot of cartography work until 2009, and are important for historical data. The contributors are likely to be different too.

• OpenStreetMap Carto

  OpenStreetMap Carto is a large, active, multi-contributor project, and with many unique contributors.

Cohorts Graph

The 2015 numbers reflect the first 10 months of the year.

We’re on pace to have a slightly bigger year than last year, but with better retention. Overall, Andy’s analysis in his talk still holds