'Open Source Software Funding Report' Finds 86% of Corporate Contributions are Employees' Time

The Linux Foundation partnered with GitHub and Harvard's Laboratory for Innovation Science to research organization-driven investments in open source software — the how and the why — surveying over 500 organizations around the world.

So what are the highlights from the published report? The median responding organization invests $520,600 (2023 USD) of annual value to OSS.

Responding organizations annually invest $1.7 billion in open source, which can be extrapolated to estimate that approximately $7.7 billion is invested across the entire open source ecosystem annually. 86% of investment is in the form of contribution labor by employees and contractors working for the funding organization, with the remaining 14% being direct financial contributions.
But the ultimate goal of the research was ideas "to improve monitoring and investing in open source" (to "create a more sustainable and impactful open source economy...") In this research, we discovered a few key obstacles that make this kind of data capture challenging... [O]rganizations have blind spots when it comes to the specifics of their contributions. Many respondents knew where they contribute, but only a portion of those could answer how many labor hours went into their OSS contributions or the percentage of budget that went to OSS. Second, the decentralized nature of organizational contributions, without explicit policies or centralized groups that encourage and organize this effort, make reporting even more challenging...

[W]e recommend that policies and practices are put in place to encourage employees to self-report their contributions, and do so using their employee email addresses to leave fingerprints on their work. We also suggest that open source work is consolidated under a single banner, such as an Open Source Program Office (OSPO). Finally, we suggest incorporating contribution monitoring into the organization's pipeline. We developed a toolkit to help improve data capture and monitoring.

employees time

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'Open Source Software Funding Report' Finds 86% of Corporate Contributions are Employees' Time

And? Is that a problem?

Re: employees time

[PPH]

And? Is that a problem?

Yes and no. It makes productivity in the OSS market more difficult to track. And that's a problem when trying to sell OSS over proprietary to the bean counters. But no. Because nobody really has a good handle on how much time is being spent by employees screwing off or doing other non productive tasks anyway.

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

Because nobody really has a good handle on how much time is being spent by employees screwing off or doing other non productive tasks anyway.

Seems like this would be equally applicable to closed-source developers.

Re:

[PPH]

Yes, but in a s/w house like Microsoft (for example) the cost of inefficiency is bundled into the products pricing. If the customer can't see it, it must not exist. And TCO rarely makes it into corporate customers calculations. Software costs $X (or $x per month) if you have to hire an army of IT support people to keep it running, that must be your fault. Microsoft has an army of in-house consultants ready to tell you this. And next year, $version+1 will cost $Y. Clean sheet of paper. Track record is not al

Re:employees time [is not valuable?]

[shanen]

Did you RTFS?

LOL

Even the summary?

ROFLMAO

But I've always felt FOSS is doomed because of the fundamental confusion about what "free" means.

free != 0 money

(Like time >> money?)

Re:

[pauljlucas]

But I've always felt FOSS is doomed because of the fundamental confusion about what "free" means.

It's been doomed for 40+ years.

Re:

[kenh]

"Free" has two definitions in this context:

"Free as in beer" = no cost

"Free as in speech" = right to inspect modify code

Anyone that spends any meaningful time in the Open Source community is very familiar with the phrase "Free, as in beer, or as in speech?"

Re:

[codebase7]

The implication is that employees are giving away company time to OSS projects and that should be stopped. Hence the demands for tracking employees across projects by using company email addresses and other fingerprints that can be tracked. ($10.00 says when "enough" contributions are made some company will try to sue the project for ownership due to "substantial company investment", "works for hire", or or some other such nonsense.)

Re:

[kenh]

Donations don't lead to ownership. OSS projects have been around since the 70s, and your fear has not been realized - I don't think that's an oversight.

Re:

[codebase7]

Donations may lead to ownership, *IF* the employee has made prior agreements (employment contract / work for hire) about the ownership of their labor. Depending on how it's written, an employer may demand an ownership stake in anything the employee makes on company time. (Or off it, and yes those contracts exist in the US. They're often given out as boilerplate terms and conditions for even the lowest of employees. Especially in red states.) Assuming they don't just demand full control outright.

Now do I t

Re:

[NotEmmanuelGoldstein]

... when "enough" contributions are made ...

The consequence being, everyone else using the software then owes money to this corporation. Not happening: The courts won't allow thievery between the plutocrats.

Or, the company will ban contributions, then complain no-one is updating (for free) security processes in the software they got for free.

Re:

[Samare]

When you contribute to a FOSS project, you release your work under its license.
FOSS licenses grant the right to use, modify, and distribute the software, modified or not, to everyone free of charge.

The only potential issue I see is software patents.
Some FOSS licenses often include a clause about that. https://google.github.io/openc... [github.io]
But that doesn't cover the case where a contributor infringes someone else's software patent.

And?

[kenh]

Responding organizations annually invest $1.7 billion in open source, which can be extrapolated to estimate that approximately $7.7 billion is invested across the entire open source ecosystem annually. 86% of investment is in the form of contribution labor by employees and contractors working for the funding organization, with the remaining 14% being direct financial contributions.

So corporations have contributed 14% of $1.7 billion in OSS, or $238 million actual dollars... is that insufficient? The other $1.5 billion in employee time is also pretty significant, if we assume each programmer has a fully-loaded cost of $200K/year, that's 7,500 person/years of contributions.