Open source: quantifying collaboration
Open source software added £46.5 billion to the UK economy in 2020, with £11.3 billion coming from the positive effects of collaboration, says OpenUK
Open source software is inevitably undervalued in terms of its contribution to the economy. This is because many of its core benefits derive from voluntary collaboration, learning new skills and the production of higher quality code, which fall through the cracks of standard economic models used to calculate GDP.
As with calculating the value of music or fresh air, putting a figure on such benefits is tricky. Nevertheless, not-for-profit group OpenUK has come up with an estimation for the monetary value of some of these intangibles.
In its latest State of Open report, published this week, OpenUK estimates the contribution by open source software to the UK economy in 2020 to be up to £46.5 billion. This figure is made up of £15.7 billion from revenue for UK businesses due to software reuse cost savings; £11.3 billion from the effects of collaboration; £10 billion from the benefits of skills acquisitions; and £9.5 billion as the estimated value of high-quality code. The overall figure for 2019 was £43 billion.
While the monetary figures are extremely tentative, they do add weight to the fact that businesses see more value in open source than just the price tag. In an earlier report, collaboration was found to be the second-most important benefit (74 per cent cited it), only just below cost savings (76 per cent).
Collaboration on code allows small companies to punch above their weight by tapping into the skills of others, and large organisations to build on competitive niches and steer the direction of development. Indeed, the report found, open source has been collaboration has been taken up most enthusiastically at either end of the size scale, whereas mid-sized organisations are more wary.
OpenUK says it is working on new models to quantify the value that open source creates for organisations, both those who participate in development, or support open source projects in other ways, and those that use it.
Sustainable needs open
A proper framework to measure the value of collaboration will be essential if open source is to play its full role in moving towards a more sustainable future, because such a future will require more sharing of tools and data, said Cristian Parrino, chief sustainability officer at OpenUK
"It is imperative that the open source principles of collaboration, decentralisation and collective equity, as well as the application of the fundamentals of open technology (hardware, software and data) being transparency, circularity and accessibility, play a central, enabling role [in transforming the economy to meet the UN's Sustainable Development goals by 2030].
"We therefore need to begin measuring the value of open source not just in economic terms, but also in societal terms."
The advent of global cloud platforms like GitHub has made the benefits of collaboration easier to achieve, said Pete Jarrett, managing director of ed-tech startup Tutorum Technologies.
"All our young developers get a tour of GitHub," Jarrett said. "GitHub is the best training resources that's available out there, as well as being a code repository."
The conversational features in such platforms are a boon to managing software delivery too, according to Dr Simon Chapman, a consultant paediatrician with the NHS who is also a coder in a small team creating apps for clinical use. Developers can ask for help and advice from their peers, and also plot progress across repositories on a Kanban board in a way that could not be done before.
"This is the first time I've really seen the value of open source software", Chapman said.
Laura James, CTO of OPEN and entrepreneur in residence at the University of Cambridge Computer Lab, believes pulling apart the various strands of collaboration and disentangling them from other aspects of ‘openness' will be a valuable step forward.
"I think that's the next generation of openness. It's not like everything should be open, it's picking the bits that can be open and should be open. It's picking the bits that can be collaborative as well - there's a lot of open but sometimes not be fully open, and sometimes you can be open and not be collaborative."
Expanding on how open technologies can drive changes in the energy sector, Gavin Starks, CEO of non-profit Icebreaker One, said: "Through open collaboration and open standards, organisations across the UK can unlock sector-wide efficiency and innovation that can enable their own data and technology strategies. It will radically reduce the cost of data sharing and transform access to data by creating cohesion and interoperability: competition should focus on impact, not the rules of the game."
Overall, 89 per cent of organisations were running open source software. Serious adoption of open source alternatives often goes hand in hand with digital transformation, said the report's lead author, Jennifer Barth of Smoothmedia.
"When you're doing that transformation, you need to consider open and where it sits, and the pandemic has sped that up: those who were furthest forward in that process were able to move quickest."