This toolkit was developed using insights from the 2024 Open Source Funding Survey and Report. The objective of the survey was to better understand how organizations (non-profits, private companies, other large entitites) invest in, contribute to, and otherwise support open source software. The documents in this toolkit are meant to help organizations better monitor and track their investment in open source. The toolkit was prepared for the 2024 Linux Foundation Member Summit workshop on open source funding tracking:
The State of Open Source Funding and Guided Workshop: Insights and Best Practices for Improving Open Source Funding - Sam Boysel, Harvard Business School; Kevin Crosby & Stephanie Lincoln, GitHub; Emma Irwin, Microsoft
The toolkit consists of several documents designed to help organizations better monitor their contribution to open source software.
- Checklist: Start here. Use this document to make sure you're covering your bases when it comes to comprehensively monitoring your organization's open source impact.
- Tracking Sheet: This worksheet helps keep track of who at your organization is contributing to open source, what form this contribution takes, and the estimated value of the investment.
- Quarterly Survey: A more concise version of our inaugural survey, the questions in this survey go beyond simply measuring the value of your organization's contribution by asking questions on motivations & incentives, decision-making processes, and challenges when it comes to your organization's involvement in open source.
- Using COCOMO metrics to understand the value of your open source dependencies: A primer on software development cost estimation. Compared with surveys, a key advantage of SLOC-based cost estimation methods are ease of scalability. This dramatically reduces the cost of monitoring orgnization-wide open source development investment.
Comments? Suggestions? Other feedback? Our hope is that this toolkit provides a starting point to iterate upon and improve efforts to monitor open source investment. Feel free to engage by opening an issue or starting a discussion.