The Linux Foundation reveals the “ugly” secret of how open source is draining your budget
The Linux Foundation reveals the “ugly” secret of how open source is draining your budget
https://thenewstack.io/roi-open-source-contribution/
Publish Date: 2026-02-25 13:23:00
Source Domain: thenewstack.io
Companies actively investing in open source are seeing massive returns, while those treating it as “freeware” are drowning in technical debt.
Here is the tech industry’s ugly little secret: Companies make billions from open source while spending peanuts to support it. A new report from the Linux Foundation, ROI for Open Source Software Contribution, reveals that organizations giving back to their core projects realize a staggering 2x to 5x return on their investment across code, community, and capital.
“Organizations that contribute back to the projects they depend on realize between 2x and 5x return on their open source investment…”
Oh, and those that don’t? Organizations that only consume open source and maintain private forks face high hidden costs, with technical debt and duplicated engineering effort adding up to millions of dollars in avoidable spending
How bad is it? According to the report, “Nearly half of all organizations (45%) maintain private forks of OSS components – averaging 86 forks per organization and consuming over 5,000 labor hours per release cycle. These private forks represent technical debt that compounds over time, as organizations trade short-term expediency for long-term maintenance burdens. Meanwhile, misalignment between open source project roadmaps and specific downstream functionality requirements costs organizations an average of $670,000 annually in workarounds alone.” That’s real money and real loss.
So, the report draws a sharp line between ROI from simply using open source and ROI from contributing back.
“It was well understood that we had a lot of economic value from open source use,” noted Hilary Carter, the Linux Foundation’s senior VP of research, in a panel discussion held on Tuesday at the Linux Foundation Member Summit in Napa, California.
“But there was still this gap in understanding the value of contributing back in different contexts, in terms of code, in terms of community…
