Homebrew and FontAwesome top Github's top tens of 2012

This diagram of GitHub's activity over the year plainly shows the growth of the service
Source: GitHub

The GitHub code hosting and peroject management site has released a look back on 2012 and included statistics for the most popular open source projects using the service in 2012. What counts as the most popular repository for the year depends on the criteria examined: The most starred project in 2012 was FontAwesome, the open source icon font designed for Twitter's Bootstrap templating system. The project attracting the most unique contributors turned out to be homebrew, a project to create "the missing package manager for OS X".

Stars on GitHub are used to keep track of projects and are therefore an indication of which projects users are most interested in. After FontAwesome, the two other open source projects in the top three starred list were TextMate, a Mac OS X text editor that went open source earlier in the year, and the JavaScript framework Meteor. Like TextMate, Meteor surfaced on GitHub earlier in the year, suggesting that GitHub users tended to predominantly star emerging projects. Other projects GitHub users were keeping an eye on in 2012 included the Select2 jQuery replacement for select boxes, the HTTPie cURL alternative and the original Prince of Persia source code for the Apple II.

In the list of projects with the most unique contributors, homebrew was followed by Ruby on Rails and the CyanogenMod ROM for Android devices. The Symfony and Zend PHP frameworks, OpenStack Compute and optional scripts for GitHub's Hubot automation tool also attracted a lot of committers.

Along with metrics on the popularity of open source projects on the service, GitHub has also released statistics on the service in general. GitHub registered a doubling in overall activity on the service since the beginning of the year and more than 10,000 individuals created their first GitHub repository in the last twelve months. Overall, the open-source friendly commercial service, built around Linus Torvald's Git distributed revision control system, now has 2.8 million users and 4.6 million repositories.

(fab)