The latest data from the Two Sigma Ventures Open Source Index is now live here. As a reminder, the goal of the Index is to rank what we deem the top 100 most influential open source projects in the world and to surface insights for entrepreneurs and developers in the open source ecosystem. You can read more about our methodology from our launch post in March, but at a high level, we aggregate Github data on project popularity, growth and developer community to create what we call the “TSV Score” for each project. Below are a few of our key learnings from the latest iteration of the Index:
The API-ification of software
In 2000, Salesforce released what is considered to be the first modern API (application programming interface). 8 years later, in 2008, Twilio became the first company to have an API as its core product. Since then, we have seen an explosion in the rise of the API economy – having a developer-first method to share data between applications has become table stakes for software companies. There are now a plethora of companies that sell APIs as their core product and most modern software consists of a patchwork of 3rd party services.
As such, it is no surprise that FastAPI, a popular Python-based framework for building APIs, is the fastest growing project in our Index in terms of Watcher growth. Additionally, Hoppscotch, another API development tool, is now a top 100 project in our Index.
Renewed interest in cryptocurrency/Web3
The latest data from our Index also confirms the renewed recent interest in cryptocurrency and Web3. Bitcoin has moved up 14 spots, from #33 to #19. Ethereum is now ranked #41. Discourse, an open source discussion platform, is now a top 100 project, in part driven by an increase in crypto forums built with the platform such as Compound and Aave. Overall, we believe that developer interest is driving a ton of innovation in the web3/DeFi world and believe that open source software will continue to be the backbone of this ecosystem.
The rise of Flutter
The rise of React, the #5 project in our Index, as a dominant front-end framework has been well-documented in recent years. However, Flutter, a cross-platform app development framework built by Google, is quickly becoming a common alternative for developers who love its ease-of-use, speed, and great UI. Flutter has moved up 25 spots in our Index from #39 to #14.
This chart of StackOverflow mentions further highlights the recent rise of Flutter and the demise of other frameworks like jquery and angular.
The JAMstack’s ubiquity
As we highlighted earlier this year, we believe the JAMstack is becoming the new standard for building web applications. This trend is further reflected in our latest Index, where a staggering number of projects are JAMstack-related. For starters, JavaScript (the J of JAMstack) is by far the most represented language in our Index, comprising 27 of the top 100 projects. Moreover, many projects represent core elements of the JAMstack workflow, including design frameworks (storybook, material-ui), static site generators (gatsby, hugo, jekyll), testing tools (cypress) and deployment tools (next.js/Vercel).
Startups continue to innovate at an unprecedented pace
What continues to amaze us is the pace of innovation in the open source ecosystem, largely driven by venture-backed startups. In the first iteration of our Index, 7 of our top 100 projects were from venture-backed tech startups. In our latest iteration, the number of venture-backed startups on our list has doubled to 14! This includes Meteor, Traefik, Serverless, Coder (code-server), Gatsby, Grafana, Cypress, Netdata, Chromatic (storybook), Redis, Vercel (next.js), HuggingFace (transformers), Databricks (spark), and Julia. Our heartfelt congratulations to these teams on their contributions to the open source community.
ML/AI is the future of software
Finally, we continue to be impressed with how machine learning and AI-related projects dominate our Index, further reinforcing our core thesis that data-driven software is the future. The #1 project in our Index remains tensorflow, the deep learning framework from Google, which also happens to be the most “Watched” project overall. Other algorithm-related projects in our list include pytorch, scikit-learn and openCV. Particularly notable new entrants to our top 100 include julia, a popular programming language focused on machine learning use cases and transformers, a high-performance library for NLU (natural language processing) and NLG (natural language generation) tasks.