Code Contributions by Email Domain

by Patrick DeVivo

Ever want to know what organizations are contributing to an open-source codebase? This AskGit query may be able to help:

Or, in other words: show me the email domains of commit authors (excluding merge commits), ordered by the most frequently occurring domain.

For instance, for the Kubernetes repo (see it live here):

Top email domains of contributors (by commit count) to the Kubernetes source code. Check it out

Some further angles to pursue

• Slice and dice by when commits were made (i.e. org 1 was more influential a year ago, now it’s org 2)
• Look at more than commit count — lines of code added/removed, files modified, types of files modified, the actual content of contributions
• Look at blame to see what lines of code contributed by an org are still in the codebase (measure code churn by organization?)

Some limitations

• Email domain may not always be a good proxy for “organization” (committers may use public email providers like gmail, or use personal emails)
• An organization may have committers using multiple email domains