Counting Contributors
How FOSSA counts the unique developers contributing to the projects you analyze, and how to email yourself the contributor report.
Overview
FOSSA tracks the unique developers ("contributors") who have committed to the git projects your organization analyzes. The count is the basis for contributor-based plans, so administrators use it to understand current usage and how it trends over time. This page explains how the count is calculated and how to email yourself the contributor report.
How contributor counting works
FOSSA derives the count from commit history across the git projects running in your organization. Two things shape the number you see:
- Two rolling windows are tracked: FOSSA records both the contributors active in the last 90 days and the last 365 days. The 365-day count is the one that reflects your organization's overall contributor usage; the 90-day count shows more recent activity. Both appear in the report.
- Similar emails are de-duplicated: where it can, FOSSA groups commits from similar email addresses for the same person into a single contributor, so one developer committing under several addresses is not over-counted.
A weekly snapshot of both counts is captured automatically, building a history you can use to see how your contributor count changes over time.
Note
For projects imported from a git provider, FOSSA reads contributors from the repository's commit history. For projects uploaded with the FOSSA CLI, contributor data is gathered on the CLI side at analysis time. Either way, the contributors roll up into the same organization count.
Emailing your contributor report
The contributor report is delivered by email as a downloadable archive. FOSSA does not render it in the browser.
- 1
Open organization settings
Go to Settings → Organization.
- 2
Send the report
Scroll to the Contributors section at the bottom of the page and click Email Weekly Contributor Report to {your email}. A confirmation appears: Report will be emailed to you within a few hours.
- 3
Download from the email
Open the email FOSSA sends you and use the download link. The link expires 24 hours after the report is generated.
Warning
You need permission to View All Projects across the organization to see the Contributors section and request the report. If the button is disabled, ask an administrator to grant org-wide project access. See Role-Based Access Control.
What the report contains
The report downloads as a single .zip archive holding several CSV files:
| File | Contents |
|---|---|
| Summary | One row per weekly snapshot, with the active contributor count in the last 90 days and last 365 days, a trend of your count over the past year. |
| Latest weekly report | The current contributor breakdown, listing each contributor and whether they were active in the last 90 days. |
| Per-snapshot reports | The individual weekly contributor reports captured over the last year. |
FAQ
Which number does my plan use? The last 365 days unique-contributor count is the one that reflects your organization's overall usage. The 90-day count is provided alongside it to show more recent activity.
A developer shows up more than once: why? FOSSA de-duplicates similar email addresses, but it can only group what it can match. Commits made under unrelated email addresses (for example, a personal address and a work address that share nothing in common) may appear as separate contributors.
My CLI project's contributors look different from its git history. Contributors for CLI-uploaded projects are collected by the CLI at analysis time, not read from the remote repository, so the set reflects what was available in the environment where fossa analyze ran.