The Value of Open Source Software

Hello, welcome. It is June 18th, 2025, and but your cover slide had me guessing for sure. And we're in Active OrgStream 9.1 with Manuel Hoffman and with Bradley Alicia as guest. We will be discussing their recent paper, The Value of Open Source Software. And looking forward to this, a lot to say that I'm sure will come after your presentation. So thank you again for joining and to you for the presentation. Great. Yeah, fantastic. Thank you, Daniel, for inviting me to present this work. And yeah, Bradley, looking forward to the discussion and everybody else on YouTube as well. If you have any comments, obviously, that's much appreciated. All right. Well, so let me just dive right into this, right? So we're covering here the value of open source software. Let me just give you an idea, right? And probably you are closer to that than maybe some of the other audience members to whom I usually present. But you can think about a bunch of companies here, Google, Ford, Intel, John Deere. And we usually can just ask, you know, what do they have in common? Well, actually, what they have in common is that, among others, they are really examples of users and contributors to open source software. And we know that open source software is really a cornerstone of modern software development. So 96% of firm code bases contain some form of open source software. That's according to the software analytics company Synopsis. And 76% of all code in firm code bases is actually open source software code. It's hugely important in cutting edge technologies, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, big data and analytics, and many other areas. So one venture capitalist, Mark Anderson, once said software is eating the world. And that was enhanced by Joseph Jacks, who used that thing, software, open source is actually eating software faster than software is eating the world. And that's why it's not. Just talking about the dominance of open source software, which just to give you the rough idea of the definition, right? Open source software is software whose source code is publicly available, usually under some permissive license. In particular, we are interested in free open source software very often, which is a public good. It's generally non-rival. So if I consume it, there's not less available for you, and it's usually non-excludable. So basically, it's the ideal form of a public good that everybody can consume. And often you can really think of that as a global public good like education. Individuals and firms have used open source software and contribute to it substantially, right? So there's been a bunch of literature, especially by my co-author here, Frank Nagle, but also a lot of other people. And we are continuously working on better understanding the open source software ecosystem, companies and individuals that engage in it. So now you're probably very familiar with this slide. Maybe I've seen it too often, this kind of figure, right? Where we can see this huge machinery of our modern digital infrastructure. And then there is this little piece at the bottom, which is a project by some random person in Nebraska that has been thanklessly maintained since 2003. So what that tells you, right, there is first, there is some huge dependency on some highly active individual, some open source maintainers without our without there could be a potential collapse of our modern digital infrastructure. And on top of that, there is a issue of the common, which is that which is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care, according to Aristoteles. Right. So there's some kind of free riding potential, not only, but also, I think, issues that we observe anecdotally and which we also see here in the data as well. So now, why do we care about the value of open source software? Well, I guess we care about the value of a lot of goods. But here in particular, we do not know actually what's the value of open source software, because it doesn't even…