The immense value of open source development in the UK has been estimated at around £43.15 billion, according to new research from advocacy group OpenUK as part of its State of Open Report for 2021.
Last month, the OpenForum Europe (OFE) think tank, under instruction from the European Commission estimated that open source developers could potentially help save the EU between €65 billion ($77.8 billion) and €95 billion ($113.7 billion).
The OpenUK report draws on these calculations and combines them with its own figures that pegged the number of UK-based open source contributors at 126,000 in 2019.
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Worth every penny
“Using the same model as the European Commission, this would lead to an economic impact between £29.52 and £43.15 billion,” explains the report.
GitHub, SUSE and the Open Invention Network have sponsored the report, which Brock says is just the first of three, all focused on estimating the value of open source to the UK economy.
“This report provides an overview of the economic impact that open source has for the UK using existing methodologies and figures. The UK was the biggest contributor to open source in the EU, ahead of Germany and France so it’s not terribly surprising to see our scale post-Brexit,” commented OpenUK’s CEO Amanda Brock.
OpenUK will enlist the help of individuals and organisations with domain expertise to help crunch the data into meaningful information.
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