https://thenewstack.io/roi-open-source-contribution/
"Companies actively investing in open source are seeing massive returns, while
those treating it as “freeware” are drowning in technical debt.
Here is the tech industry’s ugly little secret: Companies make billions from
open source while spending peanuts to support it. A new report from the Linux
Foundation,
ROI for Open Source Software Contribution, reveals that
organizations giving back to their core projects realize a staggering 2x to 5x
return on their investment across code, community, and capital.
Oh, and those that don’t? Organizations that only consume open source and
maintain private forks face high hidden costs, with technical debt and
duplicated engineering effort adding up to millions of dollars in avoidable
spending
How bad is it? According to the report, “Nearly half of all organizations (45%)
maintain private forks of OSS components – averaging 86 forks per organization
and consuming over 5,000 labor hours per release cycle. These private forks
represent technical debt that compounds over time, as organizations trade
short-term expediency for long-term maintenance burdens. Meanwhile,
misalignment between open source project roadmaps and specific downstream
functionality requirements costs organizations an average of $670,000 annually
in workarounds alone.” That’s real money and real loss.
So, the report draws a sharp line between ROI from simply using open source and
ROI from contributing back."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
