 I'm Adrienne Lawson, a data analyst at the Linux Foundation Research Team. I'm working very closely with Stephen Hendrick on the quantitative research side of the research team's activities. And today's talk is going to be about, well, I named the asymmetries in open source, but it's really going to be about the consumption contribution gap that we're seeing within our research and ways to improve the sustainability of OSS. I'll go ahead and let people enjoy. So the research is based on the Global Spotlight 2023 survey, which follows the 2022 Europe Spotlight Survey, but this time we took a worldwide approach and tried to cover as many regions of the world as we can. The objectives of the study was to examine current levels of activity of open source, as usage and contribution patterns, mainly within organizations and whether organizations are using or contributing to open source. Also to identify inhibitors and motivators. So why is it that organizations are not that willing to contribute or whether they are using a lot of open source and why is that? Also to explore opportunities in the open source landscape. Recognize the growing reliance in open source that we usually see, but it's nice to see confirmed in the data. Also to understand the piercing value of open source. Investigates benefits and challenges, strengths and weaknesses. So this is what we set out to do with this survey, with 44 questions. Just a little bit about methodology, we distributed this survey between April to June of 2023. The regional distribution of the sample looks like 33% is from the Americas, 34% is from Europe, 27% from Asia-Pacific and then 7% from other regions, which are very much lumped together and this is because we weren't able to gather that much data from those regions, which is an issue but should be discussed at another session. Our sample sizes for the Europe sample because we're open source summit Europe, I thought that there would be some findings where I would highlight the European sample and respondents. That includes 307 usable responses and for the global sample we have more than 900 people who started the survey and then of course it's a 43. It's quite a long survey so we did have people dropping out throughout but we still made use of their responses before they drop out. Now going into the results, so I'm talking about this consumption contribution gap, what is that and why do we see it in the data and how did we measure it? One thing and that's why I titled this presentation as asymmetries in open source because there is definitely an asymmetry between open source use policies and contribution policies. Here on the horizontal axis it's all about contribution and then the more we go to the right the more the policy is open and permissive so on the right its OSS contributions are openly encouraged whereas on the left OSS contributions are not at all permitted and then on the vertical axis it's the same thing but for usage policy and if it was fully symmetrical we would see most of the percentages on the diagonal and we would hope to see as many organizations in the top right corner where organizations are openly encouraging use as well as contributions but as you can see it kind of shifts the left a little bit so more organizations are permissive in their use policies compared to their contribution policies. I think another chart that nicely illustrates the difference between consumption and contribution is this chart where each of the lines are showing a region so first it's the total than the Americas then Europe Asia Pacific and then the other regions lumped together. Four questions are shown in this graph the first one is whether open source is used within the organization and the percentage shows that the amount of organizations that say they have widespread or significant or moderate use of open source so that's around the 90% range as I think all of us kind of were thinking and it's not nice to see confirmed then going down to the use policy and better open source uses encouraged or we also had another answer choice which says open source use is up to each development team within the company that is around the 70 range and Asia Pacific goes down to 66% in this case. The third question would be about what's the contributions and the policies and whether it's encouraged or up to the development team to decide whether contributions are permitted that's down to the 60s range and then the last one is about OSPOS or clear and visible strategies we did try to not fix it to OSPOS because we do know that a lot of companies are not using the term OSPOS but instead but do have a visible and clear strategy and that that goes down to the 50 40s range in the other category it's 34% and it's interesting how in Europe there's a kind of widespread use it's quite encouraged compared to the other regions but OSPOS and visible strategies are not there for example compared to the level in the Americas. I made also kind of a turn to how is open source used because we did ask a lot of questions on what are the kind of steps that people are following when they're evaluating OSS components or better to use them and yeah I think this is a quite an important takeaway. One question asked whether people believe that OSS is more secure than closed software that was 68% of respondents but the picture is not that clear because in another question we do see that 42% still raise concerns about the security of open source components and then if you even go further it's 24% of organizations who require development training in secure software development so although people are raising concerns it seems that they don't require actions that would kind of make sure that they can avoid the concerns and then when people are evaluating whether to use an open source component in their organizations most of them tend to check the activity level or other proxies and then evaluate whether to use it instead of kind of a more direct inspection into the source code which is of course not possible in every situation but it's nice to see or interesting to see that this comes up at top. All right so what about contribution how is that going within organizations? So overall 48% of organizations contributed code to an open source project we did also ask about whether they contributed non-code assets such as graphics or whether they provided documentation or opened a query on Stack Overflow but when explicitly asked about contribution to an open source or contributing code to an open source project that was 48% and that number is 54% in Europe and we also asked about kind of the steps that are followed before or when contributing open source code and I think it's a nice there's a nice difference between organizations who do have an OSPO or a clear strategy compared to those who do not the sorry the dark blue is the are the organizations with an OSPO and the light blue is organizations without an OSPO and throughout the steps we can see that around there's two times more organizations following the different steps be it code review by peers or quality assurance testing or security testing or even legal approval in sign off so there's definitely a difference and then now going into how should we narrow the gap based on the data we did have an expressive question on whether respondents agree that the following actions would increase contribution if it was invested in their organizations and at the top it was allocating employee time for open source contributions so that their employees are able to within working hours within their salaries to contribute to open source projects the 63% said funding open source projects 62 about is it 65% 62% said that providing organizational education on the OSS value proposition would increase contributions and then there were also answer choices about clear policies and open sourcing their own product all right so how do we narrow it but also let's see how much time people are spending contributing to open source projects be it personal time or within working hours all right this is a bit of a complex graph so let me talk you through it the bar charts are showing time the percentage of respondents who said that they are working this much time during the week on open source so on the left is respondents who said i'm not working in open source at all then from one hours per week to all the way to more than 40 hours per week so just showing as we as we could it's not surprising as we're going down to 40 hours it's less and less respondents saying that they're working on open source within the charts we had different questions on whether they are working on inner source projects or other employer supported projects or a third party open source projects and as you can see there are differences and most of the people are working on inner source projects and then it's going down for third party projects the pink bar is showing personal time so the amount of personal time that people are are spending to contribute it's a bit of a it can be a bit confusing because we do have to add the inner source project in person for this project and third party projects to get out all of the time spent during working hours and that does exceed the personal time that people reported in the survey and then on the right axis it's about the total hours contributed and i just wanted to add that to the graph so that people can see that even the one or two hours per week do it up and that means a lot of hours even though there's just a few people contributing more than 40 hours and that adds up as well so all contributions are equally important and hopefully employers see that so i wanted this talk to be a bit about also help to individual contributors within companies so that they are able to go to their employers and say there is value in contributing i would like you to appreciate that that i can contribute be it one or two one to four hours or full as a full-time assignment and there are values tied to that there is definitely a growing value of both use and contribution so organizations were asked whether over the last year how has the business value or benefits of your organization derived from osu's contribution changed and even for contribution 46 percent of organizations said that the value increased just because we contributed 35 percent says that it has stayed the same and four percent said that it decreased going into the specific benefits that contribution brings the question was how often do osu's contributions in your organization deliver the following benefits and improves the software quality came up on the top as 52 percent said always or often it also makes the organization a better place to work and in an industry sense enables the IT industry to be more innovative people also mentioned a moral obligation and then there was also improved security all right and now to the limits of contribution where one clear answer could be that that organizations are not seeing a clear return on contribution a clear revenue back but there are actually non-monetary limits to why organizations are not allowing contribution the first one is actually legal or licensing concerns where the dark blue is people who agree and then agree with the statement the blue is neutral this greenish is disagree then going down is also free of leaking intellectual property then a lack of policy or training materials and then actually a clear lack of return on investment is down to the fourth place technology constraints and challenges come last all right so we also asked about open-source sustainability in general not just in your organization but in a wider sense how could we improve sustainability this question is about the areas of further investment so in which areas do you think that there should be further investment in open source across our geographic region and it's segmented by region for Europe and the Americas it's government adoption of open source that's the first that came up top so government has a special role whereas in Asia Pacific they would like to see better funding of the commercial open source startups ecosystem then we also see open source alternatives to technology monopolies and better academic education whereas in Asia Pacific it was more about fostering open source global technology standards and then the third best government adoption of open source yeah and the explicit question of how should open source project sustainably be improved 63 percent of respondents said again that organization should allow time during working hours for employees to make meaningful contributions 54 percent that said that organization should accept that they have a responsibility to give back and then 44 46 percent said that employers should proactively sponsor OSS standards and project for interoperability right so now going down to the conclusions and kind of what I think are the most important findings from this data is that we can see asymmetrical open source use and contribution policies there is a gap between use and contribution and organizations need to realize their responsibility that comes with use and contribution and that there should be steps followed before contributing or during using open source it does help or it correlates with whether an organization has an OSPO or another OSS initiative to to have with that we also saw that our spend contributing do differ but all of them are equally important um as the little adds up um that there are non-minutary benefits to contribution and that the value of contribution doesn't necessarily tie into money and it has value for the organizations um we also saw that there are limits which are also not tied to money for contribution for example legal and licensing concerns um also we saw that the government has a special role in advancing open source and uh that people feel like organizations have a responsibility to the give back to the open source community and that should start with allocating employee time to open source contributions and funding um so that was the end of it um here's my contact information and there's already a europe report up with just the european results on the aleph research website and the worldwide report we will publish in the end of october and another thing that the linux foundation research does is that we share all of our data on data.world um so that people are able to reproduce our results um so thank you and now i will open it for questions yeah go ahead i think from our survey what does come up is is kind of the innovation part of it so that they feel like even though there aren't direct returns right now on the innovation that is going on here in our company be that some people are contributing to open source um they do see an innovation aspect to it as in in the whole of the industry um the other thing is that as we saw most of the time they are letting employees work on inner source projects or employer related projects so that they do see an interest in the interesting contributing as maybe one their whole open source software is dependent or their their proprietary software is dependent on an open source project um and then they contribute to that uh project so that they are able to maintain their own proprietary uh uh software um i think these are probably the the main reasons why and then i think i i think it's not we shouldn't underestimate also employers who just really see and feel a responsibility to give back be that they they um yes they they just feel a moral obligation be that they have before contributed to open source and then became a CEO of a company and then still trying to um spread this evangelism that could be too 95 90 percent of the software is open source so i think it probably the companies will rise up and try and start understanding that directly getting involved in open source or it would be more like my pages it's it's probably that that is starting i think yes i think i think it is yeah thank you for the question that's a really good question um but on one part i would like them to see the surveys and the research result that we're doing so that they are able to see that other companies are thinking that um and then maybe they would feel a bit behind if um if they're able to see the results and they're like oh people are there already this many people are having ospos um but in terms of i think probably just the the linux foundations whole ecosystem i think a lot of um sub foundations such as the cloud native computing foundation uh hyper ledger do have these um open source landscape maps and are really trying to show people that there are projects happening and um and hopefully leaders are able to see that how much their work is depending on it um the biggest uh open source foundation i would say but how is that's a really good question and i don't think i fully um comprehended that when i first joined the linux foundation which wasn't that long ago it was in march and uh i think it it really depends there are some foundations which started off as a separate entity and then uh came to join the linux foundation but still kind of have a different um well i can see it on their website for example that the website is a bit different and then in the end you can see that oh it's part of the linux foundation so i think it's they are it's it's their own strategies or their own way of trying to figure out where to fit in this but there are a lot of people there are a lot of foundations which are part of the linux foundation um and have like either fully i'm not sure about the different joining processes and it could it could be all the same but this is what i've uh i've seen is that it might be very different for the different foundations um and i'm sure that there are foundations which are not at all um uh related to the linux foundation okay sorry it's okay i'm also happy to just have a like people commenting discussing it doesn't have to be a question yeah to me i think it was this one it was um because on one on the one hand i think probably the most um important limitation to contribution is this clear lack of of investment of a return of investment but also at the same time this graph suggests that organizations that kind of went beyond this and said okay we do see value we would love to contribute but they are still facing barriers um and not able to allow contribution happening in their organizations because they are afraid of these specific things and this really comes up in for example the financial services we are also doing uh research on that which is a highly regulated industry um and it can be seen that they are very very careful um even though even if they would love to contribute there are so many barriers to do that yes unfortunately this survey was very much organization focused as in a lot of the questions are based on um is there organization doing this why do you think your organization's contribution is limited by uh etc um there aren't a lot of personal level questions there is one question about what are the motivators for you to contribute in your own personal time um but there aren't really questions on for example why is so on a personal level why is contribution limited within your own working hours um even if you're allowed to um so we did not have a question um but i think probably there's going to be a there might be a very developer focused survey coming up it might happen i'll i'll discuss with uh with the team but i um yes um that i would love to see as well but also i think this survey is very good at showing that there are a lot of organizations seeing value um and that this can be uh used as kind of uh an evidence of okay plus either please continue what we're doing which is contributing and making sure that this ecosystem persists or or trying to get there no that's so good because i feel like it's gonna take a lot of different forms within their uh a specific company or a specific organization and i think that there was even a talk about um public ospals in public sectors and how that's different from from a company ospo so it just yeah it really depends on what what each team needs and what what each company needs and feels like um or how os is going to be incorporated into their their um every day if we are done discussing i'm happy to let you go earlier but let me know if you if you need anything and also just contact me if um if there's anything uh that you would like to discuss thank you