How to Value Volunteering

The article Open source creates value, but how do you measure it? by Peter Cihon discusses the problems with valuing open source projects, and how to improve their valuing, both in general and specifically with reference to lawmakers and governments.

I'd rate this article 3/5. The writer talks about open-source is currently being valued, and how to improve that process in a way that improves the FOSS developer's position, and could potentially bring in more open-source developers. The majority of the questions are suggestions on what to research next, with some references to recent studies to cement the writer's suggestions. Overall, the article does a good job of getting the reader to consider the problems in the current scheme, but does little to suggest more concretely how to actually solve the problem.

The Good

  1. I hadn't considered until now that tools that developers use should also be considered when valuing a maintainer's productivity, but it makes complete sense.
  2. The fact that patents are more used than open source contributions as a way of saying when someone is innovative makes perfect sense on the face of it. Seeing it written though, I'm surprised at it, and will definitely be remembering it.
  3. I was completely surprised by GitHub, firstly, directly contributing to a court case (indirectly linked in the article), but also by them using an xkcd comic as part of their contribution.

The Bad

  1. I had figured that FOSS development did some level of good in terms of financial gain for businesses as well as humanitarian good, but the former had mainly been an afterthought in my mind. Learning that adding an additional 10% to the EU's current contributor base would only increase that market's GDP by about 0.5% is still surprising. I would have expected that number to at least be single digits.
  2. The fact that most existing research on FOSS software bases mainly off of cost savings from paid software seems a bit pessimistic. While it makes sense, I feel like there should be more reason to use something than "because its cheap".
  3. I expected a lot more research on open-source contribution to be done in the US. It threw me that most research was done in the EU.

Questions

  1. I've seen several references to people using packages like is-odd; and I'm genuinely curious how many people in real life development use simplistic packages that are less intensive to "just" re-implement.
  2. The article suggests to add a way to measure impact of dependencies in the impact of a project. I wonder how far down the dependency tree things should go. If everything is (ideally) somehow dependent of GNUMake and some C/++ compiler, does that mean those projects should be getting the most funding?
  3. I wonder how much research has been done in the past on open-source hardware, rather than open-source software. I feel like there would be a very different outlook.