How Kitware Became a Top Contributor to Open Source

A recent article by Google’s Felipe Hoffa recognized Kitware as a top contributor to GitHub in 2017. At 51, we rank right between CERN and SUSE.

CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research—one of the world’s largest and most respected centers for scientific research—and SUSE is known as the first provider of an Enterprise Linux distribution. According to its jobs website, CERN has over 2,250 team members and up to 13,000 people on site at any one time, while SUSE has approximately 1,000 team members. Although our team is much smaller (around 150 members), the collaborative development practices we uphold within our company, with our clients and with the broader open source community enable the collective development of software that is vastly more capable than what any individual or organization can accomplish alone.

Examples of such software from Hoffa’s article are geonotebook, which at the time of writing has 685 stars on GitHub; dockcross, which has 423 stars; and drake, which has 719 stars. In addition to these projects, we are driving the community-based development of open source platforms such as CMake, the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), ParaView, the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) and 3D Slicer.

As we move closer to 2018, we look forward to further driving open source development and thank everyone who has collaborated with us, enabling us to become a top contributor.