The Linux Foundation partnered with GitHub and Harvard’s Laboratory for Innovation Science to explore organization-driven investments in open source software – the how and why – by surveying more than 500 organizations around the world.
What are the highlights of the published report?
The average responding organization invests $520,600 (2023 USD) of annual value in OSS.
Responding organizations invest $1.7 billion annually in open source, which can be extrapolated to estimate that approximately $7.7 billion is invested annually in the entire open source ecosystem. 86% of the investments consist of contributions from employees and contractors working for the funding organization, while the remaining 14% are direct financial contributions.
But the ultimate goal of the study was ideas “to improve monitoring and investments in open source” (to “create a more sustainable and impactful open source economy…”)
In this research, we discovered a number of key obstacles that make this type of data collection challenging… (Organizations) have blind spots when it comes to the details of their contributions. Many respondents knew what they contributed to, but only some of them could answer how many working hours were included in their OSS contributions or what percentage of the budget went to OSS. Second, the decentralized nature of organizational contributions, without explicit policies or centralized groups encouraging and organizing these efforts, makes reporting even more challenging…
(W)e recommends that policies and practices be put in place to encourage employees to self-report their contributions, and to do so using their employees’ email addresses to leave fingerprints on their work. We also propose that open source work be consolidated under one banner, such as an Open Source Program Office (OSPO). Finally, we propose to include contribution monitoring in the organization’s pipeline. We have developed a toolkit to help improve data capture and monitoring.
