To the user sure, but if they are open source, bazaar-model projects, they still need a route to contributors, and GitHub is as suited for that for end user apps as it is for libraries. So while, yes, it's possible that GitHub is unrepresentative for some other reasons, I don't think that “GitHub is for developers” is a reason to dismiss this kind of statistic.

OTOH, it may well be that apps, even open source, are more likely to be cathedral model (instead of bazaar) than libraries, which might reduce the need for using GitHub or some other public repository.

In defense of my ignorance, I haven't written a line of Java in years, and I assume this is a predominantly Java ecosystem (due to the "Maven" part of the name).

Libraries and tools for coders -- what's particular about these? These are the areas where programmers are also the domain experts! So is it any wonder that these are the projects that succeed?

I guarantee openssh, Firefox, LibreOffice, and probably a hundred other applications, are (orders of magnitude) more popular than the top applications on this list.

Let's look at the success of end-user open source applications. Is there a pattern of success being correlated with prevalence of the domain knowledge in the programmer population? There will be other influences, which will bring in corporate resources and skew the degree of success, but I think this pattern holds there as well.

...on github, a community of programmers.

At this point, I just love seeing GUI software I leverage also coming with a CLI. I learn what it can do for me with the GUI and then can use the CLI to manage the heavy lifting for me.

I don't really care to argue semantics about what's a library vs. what's an app. Because many libraries have a UI and many apps have an API; that's another discussion, really (though, you've got tens of millions of people using Firefox through the UI daily and maybe a few thousand using it as a library daily...I know where I fall on the "is it an app or a library" continuum).

But, seriously, this article looked at one pile of data generated by a site that is entirely by and for programmers and declared that the entirety of OSS is represented by that data. The more I think about it, the more ridiculous, and maybe even offensive, it seems.

Basically, WIP. For now, if you have NodeJS:-

https://slimerjs.org/

It is kinda headless.

I really wonder what is the point of a CLI for, say, Krita or LibreOffice.

I'm sure the same sorts of things can be done with Krita, though I'm not familiar with it.

As for LibreOffice, that seems obvious. An easy/automated way to get data into and out of it for processing in other programs. An automated way to process lots of documents that need to stay in LibreOffice but need the same change performed on them (currency conversion, date format normalization, copyright update, etc.).

It's the same reason you'd want anything to be programmable: Automating away the tedious stuff.

Begin scriptable and having a CLI are two orthogonal concepts. With Script FU, GIMP itself executes scripts. If gimp had a CLI it means that you could be able to do stuff like "gimp --select-pen 2px solid black --moveTo 0 0 --lineTo 100 100 --lineTo 50 50" for instance (for which I don't see the point of using GIMP to do).

but why would it have to be related to libreoffice at all? couldn't the ODF format be implemented as a library, which then both libreoffice and "odf2pdf" command could be implemented upon ?