Who’s Funding Open Source? The $1.7B Question Finally Answered

We can say undoubtedly that open source is an engine powered by humans. Past research shared more than one means for measuring value, investments, costs, and the aggregate for open source.

However, how exactly open source gets funded or where the investment comes from remains an uncharted subject, leaving plenty of queries in people’s minds. It’s a matter of limited visibility and comprehension.

Thanks to insights from GitHub and Linux Foundation who collaborated with researchers from LISH to get more insights on this aspect today. The study’s main goal had to do with measuring organization-driven investments with great interest and how companies invest in open-source software.

Such insights are used to put forward recommendations for better monitoring and investments and to design a more sustainable and very impactful open-source industry. Now the audience entails those from OSPOs, leads in the engineering sector, and C-Level executives.

All the emails for responses were sent to mailing lists at GitHub and Linux Foundation. Other partner foundations such as TODO Group were a part of this and replies from nearly 501 companies arose around the globe.

After diving in, we saw many companies’ funding behaviors and possible misalignments. This includes changes for improvements. In that report, we saw the following findings:

Many firms have different categories for open source. Close to 44% have either an OSPO while 24% consume with 21% making contributions. 18% release projects and 16% influence them through leadership positions or roles for maintenance.

Most organizations don’t know how to make a contribution or where to make it. They lack clarity in terms of contributions. Meanwhile, the median responding group invests close to $520K of the yearly value to OSS.

Responding firms invest close to $1.7B in open source each year and that can go up to $7.7B throughout the whole open source sector each year. Interestingly, 86% of all the investments come from contribution labor through employees and contractors. They’re working to fund the firms while the other 14% direct the financial transactions.

Respondents invest nearly $162M in contractors which make up 57% of the community while 37% goes to foundations and 4% is directed to maintainers. The rest of the 1% heads on over to bounties. Security efforts are more focused on matters like bugs and maintenance while just 6% feel extensive security audits are necessary.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World