Counted 25 October 2026
In 344 of 984 open-source projects, one contributor wrote more than half the recent commits
Borehole reads each project's commit history and asks how much of the last two years' work came from one contributor. In 344 of the 984 public projects in its library, it was more than half, and in 158 it was three-quarters or more. These are rarely projects without a community: the median one had 28 people commit in the same two years. The counts move as the library grows.
By how widely the project is used
| GitHub stars | Projects | One contributor wrote more than half |
|---|---|---|
| Under 5,000 stars | 211 | 101 (48%) |
| 5,000 to 14,999 | 305 | 116 (38%) |
| 15,000 to 39,999 | 295 | 90 (31%) |
| 40,000 or more | 173 | 37 (21%) |
Wider use spreads the work, but not as far as stars suggest.
Why it matters in diligence
When a company is bought, its software comes with the people who know it. If one person wrote most of the recent code, a buyer needs to know whether that person stays, and what happens to the code if they don't. The repository shows where the knowledge sits. It can't show whether that person is part of the deal, so that becomes a question for the room.
In open source the same pattern is a debt to the people who carry the work. Most of these projects run well, often because one contributor keeps them running.
How this is counted
- Each project counts once, from its newest public reading.
- A contributor is an author address in the commit history. Merge commits and bots are left out.
- Recent means the last 24 months. Where a project made fewer than 50 commits in that time, its whole history is read instead (25 projects here).
- Shares are stated in bands, never as figures, and no person or project is named.
- 16 projects where one account applies everyone's changes, such as an export from a company's internal repository, are not counted: the work there is many people's.
Read a project, or your own
The library lists every project counted here, each with its own reading. AI co-authors and licence changes are the other counts across it.
Survey a repository: free on public repositories. Private code is read on your own machine by a collector whose source you can read first.