Open-source collaboration is growing worldwide and putting pressure on maintainers
Developers are pushing code and opening pull requests across economy borders at a rate GitHub has rarely seen. Outbound collaboration, the sum of git pushes and pull requests sent from developers in one economy to public repositories in another, grew by 16% from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026, according to the latest GitHub Innovation Graph data.
That is the second highest quarter-over-quarter growth rate since 2020. Only Q2 2020 ran hotter, at 21%, back when a lot of people suddenly started spending far more of their days at a keyboard.
Q1 2023 holds third place, at 9%. That was the first quarter after a research lab put a chatbot online and pulled a wave of new users into filing bug reports.
Across the largest economies, most show rising collaboration, with the European Union out front for both outbound collaboration and git pushes, and India leading the growth in new repositories.
The strain on maintainers
More contributors showing up is good news for projects and for the health of open source. It also lands as more pull requests, more issues, and more comments in the queues that maintainers work through. GitHub says the increase in contribution volume has strained several communities.
Ashley Wolf, GitHub’s Director of Open Source Programs, described this in February 2026 as the Eternal September of Open Source, borrowing a term for the point when a steady arrival of newcomers changes how an online community runs.
To ease the load, GitHub has shipped a set of maintainer controls:
- Pull request limits. Set a cap on how many open pull requests a user without write access can have in your repository at one time.
- Repo-level pull request and issue controls. Limit pull request and issue creation to collaborators, or turn either off entirely.
- Pinned comments on issues. Pin a key comment to the top of an issue straight from the comment menu.
- Noise-reducing banners. A prompt nudges people to react or subscribe in place of a “+1” or “same here” comment.
- Faster pull request diffs. Large pull requests in the new files changed view load up to 67% faster.
- Faster issue navigation. Browsing and triaging issues runs quicker for maintainers.
- Temporary interaction limits. Put a public repository into a short window of limited activity for specific users.
GitHub has opened a community discussion for maintainers to weigh in on what is working, where the gaps sit, and what would help most.
Must read:
- 20 open-source cybersecurity tools to keep your team ready for anything
- GitHub CISO on security strategy and collaborating with the open-source community
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