Quantifies the massive economic replacement value of open source and the systemic risk posed by the extreme concentration of high-value maintainers.
Widely-used open-source software (OSS) has a global supply-side value (recreation cost) of $4.15 billion, but a demand-side (usage) value of $8.8 trillion. If OSS did not exist, firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do. The creation of this value is extremely concentrated: 96% of the demand-side value is produced by only 5% of OSS developers (approximately 3,000 individuals). Six programming languages account for 84% of the demand-side value, with Go ($803 million supply value), Java, JavaScript, C, Python, and TypeScript being the most economically critical languages.
96% of OSS demand-side value comes from just 5% of developers across project lifetimes, making contributor diversity the primary predictor of long-term project viability.
sudden project abandonment or maintenance collapse due to the loss of a systemically important contributor
historically low contributor diversity directly correlates with the extreme value concentration that makes the global software supply chain fragile.
96% of the demand-side value is created by only 5% of OSS developers... a very small number of programmers are creating the bulk of OSS code.
Risk Guard tracks the number of contributors but does not weigh them by their historical 'Value-Add' across the entire ecosystem.
Risk Guard would be better if it identified 'Systemically Important Maintainers' based on their contribution to high-demand-value repositories across the ecosystem.