Do you need an account to be able to report issues or watch projects? Interested bystanders and responsible bug-reporting OSS citizens may account for some of that.
I wonder how many of those accounts have active repos of their own?
I would wonder how many of those accounts have pushed to a repo recently, not just their own (in cases where people work for a company/on a project that has a GitHub organization).
Re:GitHub Hits 1,000,000 users
by andrewl-hn on Thursday September 22, 2011 @04:37AM
(#3025345)
Yep, that's a valid point. I got my account for more than a year but I use it to report issues and for Gists only.
I imagine there's also a small, but non-trivial number of people on GitHub who wouldn't be readily identified as programmers. For example, I'm acquainted with a civil engineer that's on GitHub so he can contribute to software used with his astronomy hobby.
also designers. That might be the biggest demographic of "non-programmers" even though the designers on github veer technical.
I know Project and Account managers that have github accounts, you are probably missing those or similar users in nature
Many of our non-technical clients have Github accounts and are collaborators on our projects - we treat the commit log as our way of reporting status updates.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demographi...