Purpose With the advent of the 4th Industrial Revolution, related technologies such as IoT, big data, and artificial intelligence technologies are developing through not only specific companies but also a number of unspecified developers called open collaboration. For this reason, it is important to understand the nature of the collaboration that leads to successful open collaboration. Design/methodology/approach We focused the relationship between the collaboration characteristics and collaboration performance of developers who participating in open source software development, which is a representative open collaboration. Specifically, we create the country-specific network and draw the individual developers characteristics from the network such as collaboration scope and collaboration intensity. We compare and analyze the characteristics of developers across countries and explore whether there are differences between indicators. We develop a Web crawler for GitHub, a representative OSSD development site, and collected data of developers who located at China, Japan, Korea, the United States, and Canada. Findings China showed the characteristics of cooperation suitable for the form of weak tie theory, and consistent results were not drawn from other countries. This study confirmed the necessity of exploratory research on collaboration characteristics by country considering that there are differences in open collaboration characteristics or software development environments by country.