'Many open source development sites do not earn sustainable income'


by

othree

GitHub , an open source development platform, lets developers around the world actively review and develop, not just owners of development projects. Most of the open source projects are free of charge, and so most of the proceeds are from donations, but open source software developer Andre Startz said, “Open source projects earn a sustainable income. It is pointed out that it is not.

André Staltz-Software below the poverty line
https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html

GitHub lets you put stars on your favorite projects, and the most popular projects have collected tens of thousands of stars. You can also donate to open source projects that are originally developed for free, if the project is led to a page from Patreon , a crowdfunding platform. GitHub Sponsored started in May 2019, and it is now possible to provide direct financial support for the project.


by

Christina Morillo

Mr. Startz selected open source projects that collected a lot of stars, and checked the income from donations that each project earned in a year. By examining the GitHub repository for each project, it has measured the number of stars and how many contributors have been involved in full-time development in the last 12 months. He also looked at Patroen's user page and added the investment to the annual revenue of each project. As a result, Startz says it has successfully measured the popularity of all 58 projects, the overall team revenue, and the team size.

According to a survey by a research company, the minimum annual income of the developer was about $ 40,000 (about 4,400,000 yen), and it was over 100,000 $ (about 11,100,000 yen) in the highest class. According to Mr. Startz, this range represents the industry standard for developers, given the status as a knowledge worker , and many developers are concentrated in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. is

Mr. Startz summarized the annual revenue per star earned by each project and the number of developers contributing to the team full time in the following table. The size of the circle corresponds to the size of the team, and the color represents the annual income of the project. Blue is over 10 million, green is within the industry standard, orange is below the industry range, and red is below the US poverty standard . As you can see in the figure below, more than half of the project is red and 31% orange. 12% of the total was green for industry standards, and only 3% for the most successful blue. The median income per star is $ 1.22 (about 130 yen), and it can be said that sustainable projects generally earn $ 2 per star (about 220 yen).


by Andre'Staltz 'Medeiros

In the graph below, the vertical axis is the total amount donated, and the horizontal axis is the number of stars obtained. It can be seen that most popular projects with tens of thousands of stars have not received enough donations and are below the poverty standard.


by Andre'Staltz 'Medeiros

Of course, many of the people involved in launching and developing projects on GitHub do not do open source development as their core business, but work in a company that recognizes GitHub activities. However, the data indicates that Open Source projects can not earn enough money to make projects more sustainable if they do not invest and support them, Stalls argues. You

According to Startz, the people who are directly involved in open source projects have low income, and companies that support open source combine open source libraries and components to build their own software for profit. 'In the open source development field such as GitHub, the quality of work and the reward are not balanced in a serious way,' he said, 'to help the open source development approach become sustainable. Needs to set new rules for society, ”says Mr. Startz.


by Alexander Andrade

In addition, the concrete measures that Mr. Startz illustrated were as follows.
-Accept only companies that donate 0.5% or more of their profits to open source or do not rely on open source for their products.
-Donate to open source if you have enough income.
・ Do not give up unionization.
・ Don't destroy alternative license of new project
・ Pressurize Microsoft, which owns GitHub, to donate millions of dollars to open source projects.
• Disclose detailed data surveys and reveal the truth about the company's behavior.

in Software,   Web Service, Posted by log1i_yk