Working for a data and digital agency with deep roots in the open source community, my Link Digital colleagues and I talk about the value of open source software (OSS) all the time on this site.
Link Digital utilises many OSS components in its day-to-day work designing, building and servicing open and internal data portals and catalogues. This includes CKAN – the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network – an open source software with a global reputation for building management solutions, and Drupal, a powerful open source content management software platform.
We recommend open source technology solutions because of their flexibility, adaptability, and reliability. Software such as CKAN enables our clients to avoid license fees and vendor lock-in. This is one type of demonstrable ‘value’ that open source can deliver to clients. A related concept of value is the subject of a very recent working paper by researchers at the Harvard School of Business and the University of Toronto, which sought to put a dollar figure on what the OSS market is worth to the private sector globally.
Let’s examine the Harvard study in the context of some of the broader debates around the ‘value’ of OSS, particularly in relation to CKAN and the global community of users around it.
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The inexorable growth of open source technology
OSS has a source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance. This is as opposed to proprietary software, for which the source code is exclusively controlled by the person, team or organisation that created it, and only they can inspect or modify it.
There is no doubt open source is a rapidly growing share of the global software market. To cite a January 2025 report by one business research company, OSS’s market size is estimated to have grown from $US41.83 billion in 2024 to $US48.92 billion in 2025 alone, a development that is expected to continue The report also noted a trend in what are known as permissive open source licences, that impose minimal restrictions on software users, allowing them to incorporate OSS into proprietorial applications.
It’s worth briefly recapping some of the key reasons underlining this growth. The COVID pandemic, coupled with a more challenging policy environment generally, has seen governments, businesses and not for profits collect more data than ever before. With this has come the need for innovative and flexible solutions to organise, share and make sense of the data. The January 2025 report notes that a growing proportion of private sector users, including smaller enterprises, are attracted to OSS for its cost effectiveness and flexibility. OSS also has a growing reputation for security.
These observations very much align with Link Digital’s experience, particularly in relation to CKAN and its growing use in open data initiatives. Sophisticated OSS that can be configured and set up to function as an open or internal data platform once it is deployed and hosted on a web server, CKAN now serves as a key component in some of the largest and most successful data portals around globally.
Without open source software and their ubiquitous code-creation networks, firms would pay an estimated 3.5 times more to build the software and platforms that run their businesses, or roughly $8.8 trillion.
The Value of Open Source Software, Harvard Business School Faculty & Research
According to the Harvard study, past attempts to measure the global value of OSS have proven difficult due to its non-pecuniary nature and the lack of centralised usage tracking data. Those interested can consult the Harvard paper for their full methodology. In short, the researchers relied on innovative data sources to calculate OSS’s share of the on-line technology being used by firms globally, and the replacement cost to firms that currently use open source software, if this technology did not exist and they had to replicate it themselves. The study calculates the supply-side value of most widely used open source software is $US4.15 billion. But ‘without open source software and their ubiquitous code-creation networks, firms would pay an estimated 3.5 times more to build the software and platforms that run their businesses, or roughly $8.8 trillion.’
Private sector support for open source: size does matter
The Harvard study is oriented towards a business audience for whom numbers and metrics are a key indicator and appears only to cover private sector usage of OSS. This means, if anything, it could be underestimating open source’s overall economic contribution.
The study is certainly an important contribution to understanding the growing importance of OSS. And putting numbers on its economic impact could serve to highlight actions that governments and the private sector could take to better support the open source ecosystem. As the authors put it, their study will ‘ideally add weight to arguments that users of OSS should not just free ride but also contribute to the creation and maintenance of OSS.’ Noting that such a contribution would still be a fraction ‘a fraction of the costs to firms if OSS did not exist.’
This last sentiment has been echoed in recent research by another market analyst, which asserts there is ‘an ongoing concern regarding whether critical [open source] software is receiving adequate, sustained attention and development resources, which stakeholders need to address. Organizations who are using such solutions are realizing now that with the direct contribution, sponsorships, and developers’ support for key projects, they can ensure they will be robust and reliable.’
This is an argument which Adrià Mercader, Link Digital’s Senior Solutions Architect and a long-term contributor in the open source community, is uncertain about. ‘I’m not sure that a value-generating focused organisation like a standard company will see these macro-economic figures and decide they need to do their part. It is much more cost effective to take something for free and use it rather than invest resources trying to help maintain it.’
Mercader believes the issue of encouraging the private sector to contribute to OSS might best be viewed in the context of both the size of the company concerned and the OSS product they are using. ‘For a small to medium company, if they are using a very popular and well-established open source project (i.e., Postgres, Python, nginx, Kubernetes, etc), they are probably not going to make a difference by trying to contribute and they are going to be fine relying on it down the line (although they should if they are willing!). But if it’s a massive company relying on one or more open source products for their critical processes, then it starts to make sense to ensure that the project is healthy.’
‘Conversely, if a small to medium sized company is relying on a smaller open source product, like CKAN, then it makes a lot more sense for them to be involved to mitigate the risk of the project not progressing. Also, companies will rely on many different open source products, so it makes sense to be strategic about the ones to support.’
As noted on this popular post on the Link Digital site from November 2024, co-authored by Mercader, it is important to stress there are many ways, apart from direct financial assistance, that the private sector contributes to OSS projects; everything from occasional patches and features sent by developers working on commercial projects to funding people to work on maintenance. A significant proportion of the CKAN tech team, for example, are linked to private sector vendors, and both CKAN co-stewards are from the private sector.
More than one definition of value
When it comes to OSS, it is also important to recognise value as more than just private sector return. In the case of CKAN, for example, one of the guiding principles is open data is a public good that should be non-right restricted and easily transferable, and that creates more value the more it is shared. CKAN enables researchers, not for profits, government policy makers, and business, to better catalogue, discover, and use data to formulate responses to complex challenges. It can also support collaboration across institutional and geographic divides, improve transparency in relation to the use of data, and make decision makers more accountable.
Importantly, OSS such as CKAN can also act as a sustainable digital public good and open data infrastructure for countries and grassroots civil society movements who may lack the means to establish and maintain one on their own. It can create digital platforms on which any government, donor, academic, or member of the community can both store and access high quality and reliable data to guide decision making and action.
Further, as the November 2024 piece on our site cited above stated, while private sector involvement in OSS can bring definite benefits, it can also pose risks and challenges. The private sector sometimes has needs and goals that might not completely align with the OSS technology concerned. In the case of CKAN, it is important that the ‘original goals in terms of intended audience and use cases, and the required level of skill to use the software, are maintained… It is important that the novel points of view or practices mentioned previously don’t leave a section of the CKAN community behind, i.e., by increasing the onboarding period due to more complexity or increasing the out of the box costs of using software.’
In summary, when talking about the value of OSS, it is not just a matter of what value the private sector is getting from the software. We also need to address the issue of value in terms of what the OSS community might be getting from private sector involvement.
‘I come to OSS from a different set of values,’ states Mercader. ‘I’m more interested in freedom of choice and modification, avoiding lock-in, reusing approaches etc. Looking at open source contributions purely in economic terms might be beneficial in contexts where this is the main driving force, but we need to be mindful of the risk that then the discussion around OSS contributions becomes framed purely in economic, profit driven terms. This is important but it can’t become the main driving force.’
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