This report summarizes insights from the inaugural 2024 Open Source Software Funding Survey1, a collaboration between GitHub, the Linux Foundation, and researchers from Harvard University. The objective of this study was to better understand how organizations2 fund, contribute to, and otherwise support open source software.
Key Findings
- Scale
- Organizations contribute $7.7 billion USD annually to open source software3
- The majority (86%) of contribution value is employee labor.
- Challenges
- Organizations have a good sense of why and how they contribute, but blind spots exist for funding specifics
- Measuring OSS funding becomes even more problematic when operations are decentralized
- Lessons learned
- Leave “fingerprints” on your organization’s OSS efforts to help managers, researchers, and other observers more easily collect this information.
- Empower employees to self report contributions made under the organization’s banner.
- Make OSS contribution part of your monitoring pipeline by conducting brief, regular surveys within your organization to collect key metrics.
- Consider sharing data to public OSS funding index.
- Toolkit
- Using these learnings, we develop a collection of resources for organizations looking to improve monitoring and insight into their open source engagement: https://github.com/sboysel/open-source-funding-toolkit
Source: 2024 Open Source Software Funding Report
Robin Edgar
Organisational Structures | Technology and Science | Military, IT and Lifestyle consultancy | Social, Broadcast & Cross Media | Flying aircraft
robin@edgarbv.com
https://www.edgarbv.com