The Ultimate Guide to Contributing to Open Source Projects

GitHub added 36 million new developers in 2025, roughly one new account every second, pushing the platform past 180 million developers total. Nearly a billion commits got pushed over the year, up 25% from the year before, and 43.2 million pull requests (PRs) were merged every month. Open source has never been bigger or more accessible. It's also never been under more strain. GitHub's own Octoverse report names a widening "contributor-to-maintainer gap," made worse by what the industry has started calling "AI slop": low-quality, auto-generated pull requests that consume maintainer time without adding real value. The Jazzband collective, a well-known hub for Python projects, shut down entirely in 2025, with its lead maintainer citing the unsustainable volume of AI-generated spam PRs and issues as a primary driver. Both of these things are true at once, and neither cancels the other out. Open source is genuinely more open to new contributors than it has ever been; 83% of organizations now consider it valuable to their future, and a verifiable history of real, merged contributions is one of the few signals that still cuts through a flooded hiring market. But the bar for what counts as a good contribution has quietly gone…