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A free scan shows the junk files, broken settings and background clutter dragging Windows down - then fixes them in one click.Free scan · Windows 10 & 11No—not across the board. Open source remains active and valuable, with new projects and contributors arriving on major platforms. But growth does not tell us whether contributors feel excited, and it does not erase the pressure on maintainers to fund, govern, secure and review their projects. The best-supported answer is mixed: open source is thriving in important ways, while the experience of sustaining it can be difficult.
What does the evidence say about open source activity?
GitHub’s platform figures show substantial activity, but they describe GitHub rather than the whole open source ecosystem. In its 2026 outlook, reporting on 2025, GitHub said about 36 million new developers joined the platform. India accounted for 5.2 million of them. Those are GitHub joiner counts—not a global tally of people who began contributing to open source. GitHub’s 2026 open source outlook
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Earlier GitHub figures offer more signs of scale: in 2024, the platform reported 518 million projects, up 25% year over year, and nearly one billion contributions to public and open source projects. These platform totals indicate activity and growth, not how many projects are healthy or how contributors feel about taking part. GitHub’s 2024 Octoverse report
Does activity mean people still find open source exciting?
Not necessarily. Project counts, contributions and new accounts measure observable activity; they do not measure joy, satisfaction or a sense of community. The available figures do not provide a historical trend for subjective excitement, so they cannot establish that contributors are more or less enthusiastic than they used to be.
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The question “What happened to the joy of contributing to open-source?” captures a concern people express, but an anecdotal phrase is not evidence that the mood has shifted across the ecosystem. A project can attract users and contributions while some of its maintainers find the ongoing work draining.
Why might open source feel less rewarding for maintainers?
Growth creates work as well as opportunity. Contributions and users can mean more issues to triage, code to review, documentation to maintain and security questions to answer. Whether that work is manageable depends on the people, time, funding and processes available to a particular project.
The Linux Foundation’s 2024 survey summary reports that respondents increasingly perceived benefits and business value in open source, while time and funding remained major challenges to contributing. Its 2025 report describes continued dependence on open source alongside gaps in governance and security frameworks. These findings point to a sustainability problem, not proof that contributors have lost interest. Linux Foundation Research: The State of Global Open Source 2025 · Linux Foundation Research: 2024 Global Spotlight Insights Report
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Support also appears uneven in the 2024 Open Source Survey: only a small share of respondents reported frequent financial or in-kind support, while about half selected “never” in most support categories. The survey reflects its respondents, not every open source contributor, but it helps explain why a project’s public value may not translate into reliable resources for the people maintaining it. Open Source Survey 2024
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Is AI driving the growth, or are other projects thriving too?
AI is a major part of the recent growth story, but it is not the entire story. GitHub said about 60% of its top-growing projects in 2025 were AI-focused and described AI as a major driver of global participation that year. That is GitHub’s analysis of activity on its platform, not an independent measure of AI’s effect across all open source work.
GitHub also pointed to Home Assistant, VS Code and Godot as examples of non-AI projects that continued to thrive. Its 2024 figures counted 137,000 public generative AI projects, up 98% year over year. Together, these figures show strong interest in AI alongside substantial non-AI activity; neither category tells us how contributors feel. GitHub’s 2026 open source outlook · GitHub’s 2024 Octoverse report
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What do surveys tell us about how people use open source?
In the 2024 Open Source Survey, 72% of respondents said they used AI tools for coding or documentation, and 82% said security was important when deciding whether to use an open source project. These are survey respondent results, not universal estimates of developer behavior. They show that AI-assisted work and security expectations are part of current open source practice, but they do not measure excitement. Open Source Survey 2024
More broadly, survey summaries and platform activity answer different questions. GitHub’s numbers describe activity on one major platform; survey responses describe what participants report; Linux Foundation research highlights perceived value and organizational challenges. None supplies a single reliable score for the health or enthusiasm of every project.
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So, is open source no longer exciting?
The evidence does not support a blanket yes. Open source remains active, widely used and valuable, and interest extends beyond AI. At the same time, public growth can coexist with limited maintainer time, inconsistent funding and gaps in governance or security capacity. Excitement is personal and community-specific; sustainability is the practical challenge the available evidence makes clearer.
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