Quantifies the massive economic 'Replacement Value' of open source and identifies the extreme concentration of maintainer value as a systemic risk.
Harvard research estimates the demand-side value of open-source software (OSS) at $8.8 trillion—the replacement cost firms would pay to build their software platforms from scratch if OSS were not freely available. This represents 3.5 times what firms currently spend on software development. While the demand value is in the trillions, the supply-side cost to build these packages once is estimated at only $4.2 billion, reflecting a massive 'value multiplier.' However, this ecosystem is alarmingly fragile: only 5% of programmers are responsible for 90% of the total value created. The study highlights that 96% of commercial applications rely on OSS, yet most firms underestimate their dependency on a tiny group of critical maintainers.
90% of the ecosystem's $8.8 trillion value is created by just 5% of developers across project lifetimes, creating a systemic bus factor risk for the global economy.
global economic disruption due to the loss of a systemically important maintainer
historically low contributor diversity across project lifetimes is the definitive metric for systemic continuity risk, as proven by the extreme value-per-developer ratio.
5 percent of programmers were responsible for more than 90 percent of the value created for both supply and demand.
Risk Guard evaluates technical risk but doesn't calculate the 'Replacement Cost Liability' if a critical dependency were to disappear or become unusable.
Risk Guard would be better if it estimated the 'Economic Criticality' of a package based on its estimated replacement cost (demand-side value).