Open source projects have fundamentally transformed the technology landscape, sparking innovation in several parts of the economy, not only in IT and software but also across telecommunications, financial services, the public sector, education and research as well as the manufacturing sectors.
An industry survey points to how 83% of enterprises consider open source software adoption valuable to their future, where increased productivity is a key rationale supported by 86%. A recent study supports provide part of the rationale, showing how companies would be required to spend 3.5 times more on software without the use of open source. On the national level, another study projected that a 10% increase in Open Source Software (OSS) contributions could add 0.4% to 0.6% GDP annually and more than 600 ICT start-ups.
The value open source brings in terms of economic growth and competitiveness is, hence, hard to argue against, and provides a critical lever for Europe in order to keep pace with, for example, US and China. A recent analysis of data obtained from GitHub and analysed in the context of the OSAward.eu project, show how open source adoption is moving toward deeper organisational embedding across the three economies, i.e. (US, China and the EU), aligning with industry surveys.
Specifically, the analysis as presented in Figure 1 tells how the EU-27 on an aggregated level is keeping pace and overtaking the US considering organisational embedding intensity, which is defined as the degree to which repositories are concentrated within organisations, rather than dispersed across isolated individual ownership, indicating the professionalisation of the OSS ecosystem, which relates the number of GitHub repositories associated per organisation. This measure (see "Note 1" below Figure 1) thus captures the depth of human capital engagement and distinguishes between ecosystems characterised by many lightly staffed repositories and those with denser collaborative structures embedded in an organisational context.
Compared to China, however, both Europe and the US are clearly lagging behind noting the development until the period 2016-2018. The sudden drop can at least partly be attributed to the rise of Gitee, a very popular DevOps platform launched launched in 2013 by Open Source China (OSChina), a Shenzhen-based open-source software company, which is why the number of repositories as well as the repositories per organisation experienced a decrease when looking at GitHub data only (access the source material of the graphic below).
(Note 1: The measure is defined as the number of repositories per organisation. A caveat of this indicator is that a GitHub organisation does not necessarily indicate a professional organisation, i.e. in a commercial and public context. Still, it provides a signal of professionalisation as developers organise themselves under a common affiliation, and building an ecosystem of related projects).
Increased organisational adoption and professionalisation can also be noted in a broader global context. Figure 2 points to steady increases in organisational embedding over time, with especially fast acceleration in a subset of emerging ecosystems, especially in India and Brazil where the rise of professionalisation is especially steep. The two outpace both EU-27 and the US, and align more with the levels of China, recognising their drop in the data after 2019. The figure points to the strategic importance and value of open source in emerging economies accelerating technological development and innovation. By adopting and contributing to open source systems, these economies can access cutting-edge tools and position themselves as active contributors in the global digital ecosystem (access the source material of the graphic below).
Considering this contrasting landscape of global escalation in technical evolution, the conversion of open source adoption into durable organisational capacity becomes a central issue for European policy, in light both of autonomy and competitiveness.
In one of our earlier blog posts, we found that while Europe accounts for a substantial share of global developers, its contribution to open source infrastructure remains fragmented across countries, with activity - as measured by the number of GitHub commits - concentrated to a small number of Member States, with activities in absolute terms focusing in Germany and France, which together represent more than 40% of the total European output (Figure 3). Europe’s open source capacity is thus unevenly distributed across Member States, which can be seen at least partly as a result of a lack of coordination, leading to fragmented and sub-optimal results (access the source material of the graphic below).
Our analyses of the professionalisation of the OSS ecosystem within the EU-27, however, reveal a different picture. Here, a more balanced profile emerges. Smaller countries, like Latvia, Ireland, Cyprus, Romania, Slovakia and Greece show comparably large levels of professionalisation, which leads to a similar argument that already has been made for the emerging economies in grasping the opportunities open source brings. When adjusted once adjusted for population, the variance across member states even decreases, suggesting that, despite apparent fragmentation at first glance, the member states share more similarities than differences when accounting for their respective population sizes (access the source material of the graphic below).
(Note: Latvia’s 2023 value is capped for readability. The result reflects an unusually concentrated country-year observation, with a very small organizational base generating an exceptionally high repositories-per-organization ratio).
Considering our analysis at large, Europe shows promise with the larger countries leading a long tail that is accelerating in pace. The overall performance is, however, still lagging. The professionalisation and recognition of open source needs fuel, and go from fragmented to coordinated policy and action. Public procurement provides a core lever to grow and promote European capabilities is one approach that needs priority. Addressing the skills gap and enabling investment into European vendor ecosystems are two others.
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