Users and Usage

The demand for OSS is everywhere, though its users and usage is not always apparent. Recent reports estimate that 95-97%^1,2 of mainstream IT organisations leverage nontrivial OSS assets within their mission-critical IT portfolios, whether they know it or not. Meanwhile, internal government policy is emerging in the USA and EU, “encouraging and leveraging the transformative, innovative and collaborative power of open source, its principles and development practices”³, with more-and-more government agencies adopting OSS within their operations – including many of the identified projects within this report. When it comes to sustainability, however, there is much potential yet to be realised. While tracking outcomes and impacts associated with OSS remains challenging, the following trends highlight the importance of open source within environmental sustainability for fellow contributors, end users, and greater society.

Dependencies

Since open source is free to acquire and freely available, its ultimate use is difficult to track. Much of the open source usage arises in integrating libraries or APIs as dependencies of other software projects. Importantly, this dependency on OSS will not be apparent to many users; especially in closed-source software, where the dependency on OSS is not always made evident. Users act as evangelists by sharing OSS with other users or organisations that can benefit from it, and in return provide valuable feedback and expertise.

Project usage data from public software development and version control platforms remains scarce. GitHub, unfortunately, offers little support in compiling accurate statistics. Additionally, statistics on package manager downloads are not universally available and must be obtained through the various platforms and their APIs. While this is technically possible, it was not feasible given the study’s limited resources and timeframe. However, with the limited data obtained from the Python ecosystem, it was possible to identify individual projects with a high circulation but a low DDS score. Here projects like cfgrib, sentinelhub-py or Meteostat stand out. Those projects widely used and depend highly on the goodwill of a single developer. The median DDS of 0.436 over the 50 most used Python projects indicates that the burden still lies with a few strong contributors leading the development.

The user community of major projects in energy and battery modelling, such as PyBaMM and PyPSA, is split relatively evenly between academia and industry, with fewer users coming from NGOs and independent consultancies. In some cases, industry can drive explosive user growth. For example, over a five-year period, pvlib-python saw thousands of downloads per month. This was driven primarily by several commercial firms who integrated the library into their software products, effectively distributing pvlib-python to their clients.

Fig. 41 - Python Projects most frequently used as dependencies

End Users

Capturing the end users and ulitmate use of OSS remains challenging. Due to the complexity of tracing and tracking the cause-effect chain within socio-technical-ecological systems, this report does not attempt to provide an exhaustive evaluation of impact (neither social, economic, nor environmental) of Open Sustainability approaches. Rather, throughout the report, we provide key examples of projects whose outputs indicate a significate capacity towards, and demostrate allignment with the direction of science-based impact. While many of the identified open source projects contribute to supporting and accelerating sustainable outcomes, some contributions are more evident than others. In this section, we higlight several of these.

A particularly impactful project is pyam, led by the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC). This project played a fundamental role in the recently published IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR15), producing an ensemble of quantitative, model-based climate change mitigation pathways which underpinning the report. The report has since been cited 106 times and continues to inform governments and decision-makers on the latest climate research and the state of our progress in meeting international climate agreements. Meanwhile, as highlighted in the chapter on growth, green software management solutions are being adopted at scale within the IT industry. Industry-led non-profit, Green Software Foundation, has seen a high level of backing from tech giants, including Google and Microsoft, who also claim to use these open source tools internally. The Natural Capital Project tool, InVEST, has been applied across sectors worldwide (Africa, India, Central America, USA, China) to answer questions related to land use change, economic valuation of ecosystem services, watershed management, and more. OpenLCA is one of the leading lifecycle assessment tool trusted by governments, consultants and researchers to quantify the impacts of goods, services and processes. The FIWARE Foundation’s Smart Data Models are used by thousands of smart cities globally, improving the interoperability between smart devices, sectors and organisations and enhancing decision-making related to sustainable development. Finally, Global Forest Watch, an open source project led by the World Resource Institute, provides real-time forest monitoring tools to NGOs, governments and decision-makers in an effort to accelerate conservation projects at a global scale. Since its launch in 2014, over 4 million people have visited the platform.

The adoption of open source software and its principles is rarely reflected within official government policy. However, several promising developments can be found. In 2016, the USA Government published a federal source code policy.⁴ This policy mandates at least 20% of custom source code developed by USA federal agencies must be released as OSS and shared between agencies. Likewise, the European Commission’s internal Open Source Software Strategy “promotes the sharing and reuse of software solutions, knowledge and expertise, to deliver better European services that benefit society and lower costs to society.”³ While not exclusive to sustainability, this policy development acknowledges the potential for impact in this area.

Monetary Value

There are few reports available that attempt to assess the economic impact of open source software at national or higher scales. While open source business models, including the commonly used premium model, are unlikely to capture the total value that OSS contributes to society, recent research into the economic contributions of open source can provide a rough indication. A 2021 study on the economic impact of open source software and hardware concluded that open source technologies injected €65-95 billion into the European economy. Open source significantly boosted small and mid-size enterprises – Europe’s most important horizontal economic stakeholders – reflected in the increased creation of more than 650 technology startups per year. While it is currently unknown to what extent open source has contributed to environmental sustainability, or what its potential economic impact is, we anticipate the monetary value to be several orders of magnitude greater.

Going Foward

Capturing the use of open source projects, and understanding its users and the value they provide to, and obtain from the ecosystem, presents important yet significant challenges. No standards yet exists for measuring the time and resources saved by “standing on the shoulders of giants” and to what degree the added height extended one’s view or reach. In future studies, it will be essential to use the various metrics and methods we have created in a targeted way. For example, by identifying projects that have high usage, fast growth and low DDS, we can conduct targeted interviews to pinpoint key users and usage patterns, assess direct and indirect impact, and evaluate ways of supporting effective projects. Until this time, we have considered several proxy methods to help paint a picture of what is possible.

Note

Want to share a case study and/or evidence of open source impact within sustainability? Get in touch.