open source According to a recent analysis, the software industry is booming, with organizations investing approximately US$7.7 billion in the ecosystem annually.
Researchers from GitHub, Linux Foundationand Harvard’s Laboratory for Innovation Science (LISH) found that the average investment in open source is currently $520,600 for each individual business.
However, this is not all direct funding: only 14% of this amount comes from direct financial contributions. Instead, the study found that 86% of investment comes in the form of labor input from employees and contractors working for organizations.
In fact, more than half of direct funding went to contractors: 17% for specific projects and 16% for foundations. Communities and maintainers each accounted for 4%, while bounty platforms accounted for 1%.
In addition to code contributions, funding is most likely to come from donations (21%), foundation memberships (17%), or event sponsorships (14%).
IN blog post Through the Linux Foundation in December, authors Hilary Carter and Martin Woodward said they were identifying funding sources as part of open source community it wasn’t easy.
They noted that this is a long-standing problem, as investments remain “an opaque subject with limited visibility.”
“Organizations have blind spots when it comes to the specifics of their contributions. Many respondents knew where they contributed, but only a fraction could answer how many work hours went into their OSS contributions or the percentage of the budget that went to OSS, they said.
“Second, the decentralized nature of organizational input without clear policies or centralized groups to encourage and organize these efforts makes accountability even more challenging.”
Researchers found that organizations have varying levels of open source experience, with nearly 44% either having or wanting to establish open source program offices. Only 21% contribute to projects, 18% release projects, and 16% influence projects through a leadership or maintainer role.
Four out of ten firms provide open source code daily, and six out of ten provide open source code at least weekly. The study notes that there does not appear to be any strong correlation between company size and frequency of code contributions.
“We very rarely contribute. We are a non-profit organization. If we were better funded, we would devote more resources to contribute to the community, but we already serve an underrepresented community,” said one respondent.
Organizations are most likely to contribute in the form of bug reports (19%), features (19%), general maintenance (18%) and documentation (16%), with governance at 7% and cybersecurity audits at 6%. and legal advice for only 3%.
Four in ten participants are developers or software engineers, with 17% being community advocates or developers and 11% being IT professionals, systems administrators, or DevOps. For most of them, open source is just part of their job.
Respondents sought access to long-term open source funding for all aspects of project development and said they did not always receive it.
“Over the years, we have created several popular and useful open source tools. It is always difficult to find funding for basic maintenance of these projects,” one of them said.
“Funding sources prefer to pay for new features rather than for solving problems and basic maintenance. It would be nice if the Linux Foundation had funding streams for this kind of work for projects.”