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The 2024 Open Source Software Funding Report estimates that organizations contribute about $7.7 billion a year in value to open-source software. That is not $7.7 billion in donations or cash payments: the estimate includes employee work, which accounts for about 86% of the contribution value. The report separately records about $162 million in financial support among survey respondents.
What the report measures
Published November 19, 2024, the 2024 Open Source Software Funding Report was produced through a collaboration involving GitHub, the Linux Foundation, Harvard researchers, and researchers affiliated with Georgia Tech and the University of Lausanne. It examines how organizations support open-source software (OSS), rather than measuring the total economic value of OSS to society.
The survey received responses from 159 organizations, including private companies, nonprofits, and public agencies. It was aimed at people who understood their organization’s OSS engagement, such as OSPO leaders and engineering, product, or executive staff. This is not a random census of every organization that uses open-source software.
The headline figures—and what they mean
| Figure | What it represents | How to read it |
|---|---|---|
| About $7.7 billion annually | Estimated organizational contribution value across the broader ecosystem | An extrapolated estimate, not cash funding |
| About $1.7 billion | Contribution value reported by the 159 respondents | Respondent activity, expressed in 2023 U.S. dollars |
| About 86% | Share of contribution value attributed to employee labor | Labor is the largest component |
| About $162 million | Financial support reported by respondents | A separate, much narrower measure than total contribution value |
The distinction matters: saying organizations contributed an estimated $7.7 billion in value does not mean they transferred that amount to projects, foundations, or maintainers. A company may support OSS by paying engineers to maintain a dependency, review patches, respond to security issues, or contribute upstream. Those activities have economic value, but they are not donations.
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Cash, in-kind support, and contribution value
It helps to separate three related measures:
- Financial support: money paid through contractor agreements, donations, foundation or project support, direct maintainer payments, bounties, and sponsorships.
- In-kind organizational support: employee time, infrastructure, security work, research, event speakers, marketing, logistics, documentation, and governance work.
- Contribution value: the report’s broader valuation of organizational support, combining labor and other contributions rather than counting cash transfers alone.
These forms of support are not interchangeable. A foundation membership may support shared governance or ecosystem services without sending money directly to a particular project. A contractor agreement may buy development capacity but not provide unrestricted funding to maintainers. Direct payment to a maintainer is a different channel again.
Where the reported financial support went
The Linux Foundation summarized the approximately $162 million in reported financial support as going primarily to contractors (57%), foundations and projects or communities (37%), maintainers (4%), and bounties (1%). These rounded categories do not add to exactly 100%, and should not be treated as a complete audited budget taxonomy. See the Linux Foundation’s summary for its presentation of the figures.
The categories also have different implications for sustainability. Contractor spending can fund useful engineering, but does not necessarily create recurring, unrestricted support for a project. Foundation funding may sustain shared infrastructure, events, security, or governance across multiple projects. Direct maintainer payments connect support more closely to the people doing the work, while bounties typically pay for defined tasks and may not cover triage, releases, or ongoing maintenance.
Support beyond code and cash
Organizations reported non-code forms of contribution as well. The most frequently reported were donations (21%), foundation membership (17%), and event sponsorship (14%). These are percentages of organizations reporting practices, not shares of total funding value. The report also notes that 11% donated to foundations, nonprofits, or general funds, while 10% donated directly to maintainers or software projects.
Event support can include more than a sponsorship payment: respondents described providing speakers, financial sponsorship, marketing, logistics, and content curation. Such work can benefit a community, but it is not necessarily money available to pay a maintainer or fund a specific dependency.
How the $7.7 billion estimate was developed
The researchers gathered organizational contribution information through the survey, calculated reported value among respondents, and used public GitHub commit activity and organizational affiliations as part of the basis for scaling observed activity. They then extrapolated to estimate broader organizational contributions. The report discusses assumptions and a range of plausible outcomes in its appendix; consult the full report for the methodology.
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The result is model-dependent, not a ledger of invoices, payroll records, grants, or donations. Public repository activity is an imperfect proxy for OSS work: it may miss or unevenly represent contributions made through other forges, private repositories, issue triage, documentation, release engineering, governance, security response, and community work. Labor valuation also depends on compensation and allocation assumptions, while repository-based organizational affiliation may not identify every contributor accurately. These limitations do not make the estimate meaningless, but they do mean it should be cited as an estimate—not an audited total of worldwide OSS funding.
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Why organizational OSS support is hard to measure
Open-source work is spread across companies, foundations, contractors, public agencies, and volunteers. An employee may contribute under an employer’s banner without a central reporting process. Several business units may support the same project independently. A company may know which dependencies it uses but not how many staff hours go upstream, while finance may record a foundation payment without knowing which projects ultimately benefit.
Direct donations and sponsorships are comparatively easy to record. Maintenance work, review, incident response, security audits, infrastructure, and governance can be harder to classify and value. Public GitHub commits reveal only part of that activity. The report’s emphasis on better organizational fingerprints and employee self-reporting responds to these visibility gaps.
A practical measurement plan for an OSPO
The following is a practical implementation model, not a dashboard prescribed verbatim by the report. An organization can review it annually and, where feasible, connect each measure to the projects or dependencies it supports.
| Area | Useful measure | Why it helps |
|---|---|---|
| Upstream labor | Employee hours or FTE allocation, by project and contribution type | Makes the largest support channel visible |
| Direct funding | Payments to maintainers, projects, and foundations; recurring versus one-time | Separates unrestricted or direct support from broader ecosystem dues |
| Contractors | Contracts, invoices, deliverables, and project beneficiaries | Shows where purchased engineering capacity goes |
| Security | Audits, vulnerability remediation, tooling, and response work | Tracks support that may not look like feature development |
| Community | Events, documentation, governance, research, and infrastructure | Captures non-code contributions alongside engineering work |
| Dependency exposure | Critical internal dependencies and business services relying on them | Helps prioritize support according to organizational risk |
| Continuity and outcomes | Funding duration, sponsor concentration, releases, fixes, and response times | Distinguishes a one-time contribution from durable capacity |
Use a consistent vocabulary across the OSPO, engineering, procurement, security, and finance teams. Record both direct and indirect support, and avoid counting the same contribution twice—for example, recording a contractor invoice and also counting the contractor’s hours as employee labor. For each payment, ask whether it is restricted, recurring, and intended for a particular project or broader ecosystem activity.
What the report does not establish
The aggregate estimate does not show whether support is fairly distributed, whether the most critical dependencies receive enough resources, or whether funding is recurring. It does not prove that a project is sustainable simply because organizations contribute substantial value to OSS overall. Nor does it measure volunteer contributions in the same way as organizational support. A large user is not automatically a large upstream funder, and a project receiving money from one major sponsor can remain vulnerable if that sponsor leaves. These are questions organizations should investigate at the project level, not conclusions that follow from the headline total.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Funding mechanisms serve different needs
The report is not a directory of funding programs, but its categories make clear why organizations should match the support mechanism to the goal:
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- Corporate employment: Hiring maintainers or assigning engineers can provide predictable capacity. The work may nevertheless follow company priorities, so community governance and succession planning matter.
- Foundation membership: Dues can support shared infrastructure, governance, events, and programs. This suits ecosystem-wide support, but may not directly compensate a specific maintainer. The Linux Foundation describes its broader ecosystem and research work; membership terms vary by program.
- Direct maintainer sponsorship: Payments can reach maintainers more directly, but may raise administrative, tax, employment, or governance questions. GitHub Sponsors is one mechanism for eligible developers and projects; check its current terms and eligibility.
- Grants and public funding: Public-interest programs can support security, resilience, and infrastructure whose benefits are widely shared. The Sovereign Tech Agency describes relevant programs; eligibility, application windows, and award conditions depend on the specific program.
- Commercial support: Hosting, consulting, security, compliance, and managed services can create recurring revenue and give users service commitments. Those models may shape product priorities and do not necessarily fund upstream maintenance unless that is part of the arrangement.
- Bounties: Useful for narrowly scoped fixes, but usually a poor substitute for ongoing maintenance, release engineering, and governance.
- Venture investment: Capital for companies building products around OSS is not the same as funding a public-good project. GitHub has described a $10 million GitHub Fund commitment with M12 aimed at investing in open-source companies; that is a separate initiative, not part of the 2024 report’s measured funding.
No mechanism is best for every project. For a dependency critical to business operations, an organization might combine paid upstream engineering, direct or foundation support, and security work while checking whether the money reaches the intended maintainers and whether the support can continue.
The practical takeaway
The report’s most useful message is not simply that the estimated value is large. It is that employee labor dominates organizational OSS support, while many organizations still lack a clear account of where their money, time, and other resources go. To understand an organization’s real contribution, measure cash and labor separately, make indirect support visible, and track whether support reaches the projects and people whose work the organization depends on.
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