• GitHub calls for public sector funding for open-source.
• Terms OSS “digital infrastructure.”
• Disparity between financial investment and business benefits.

GitHub has called for public funding for open-source software (OSS), citing Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency as a distribution model that could be scaled up to full EU level.

The company says the value of open-source to the global economy is an estimated $8.8 trillion, with between €65 and €95 billion contributed to the EU’s economy each year.

According to the Sovereign Tech Agency (STA), a third of open-source developers get no payment at all for maintaining what are often critical elements of global infrastructure, and several events in recent years have exposed the fact that many open-source projects are maintained and developed by a single unpaid volunteer or very small teams.

The Log4Shell incident in 2021, for example, was described by Tenable as “the single biggest, most critical vulnerability ever.” The Java logging framework, Log4j, was originally developed by a single developer, Ceki Gülcü, and donated to the Apache Software Foundation in 2003. Vulnerabilities exposed in the code gave the issue a CVSS severity rating of ten at the time. Log4j continues to be used in millions of projects.

It’s worth noting that the Apache Software Foundation is funded by donations from individuals and sponsorship organisations, among whom are Microsoft, AWS, Google, and Huawei. However, the vast majority of open-source software projects are funded, if at all, by ad-hoc donations.

The Sovereign Tech Fund from the STA supports around 30 projects a year, giving each between €50,000 to €500,000, an annual total subsidy of about €10 million, and is funded by the German government.

Microsoft’s GitHub wants state funding

GitHub’s call for public funds to help address the open-source funding crisis has highly-nuanced facets. The company’s owners, Microsoft, is one of the biggest contributors to open-source projects monetarily and in terms of code commits, but most of its products are built using open-source software, products that it’s monetised to an extent that’s turned it into a trillion-dollar corporation.

Calls for taxpayer funding to prop up the production and maintenance of software that the corporation benefits from directly is an admission that it, and other companies, are not funding the software eco-system to a sufficient degree.

There’s also the issue of Microsoft’s ownership of GitHub, which is the world’s most popular code repository. The greater the number of projects hosted by, and the more activity taking place on GitHub, the more Microsoft benefits. Its use of developers’ code, irrespective of licence, forms the basis of its Copilot development AI, one of both companies’ sources of revenue.

Funds from the taxpayer

Were Microsoft and other big technology companies reliable and notable tax-payers, the call for state funding for open-source would be less contentious. However, Microsoft is among the companies that actively avoid paying tax on income, making much use of international subsidiaries, overseas tax domiciles, and other legally-acceptable tax-avoidance practices. Detailed in a 2022 report by Cictar (the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research), Microsoft reported operational profit margins of around 30% to its shareholders, but in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, its local subsidiaries’ financial reporting pegged taxable profit margins of between 3% and 5%.

The GitHub blog calling for EU bodies to publicly fund open-source software states, “Open source software is open digital infrastructure that our economies and societies rely on. Nevertheless, open source maintenance continues to be underfunded, especially when compared to physical infrastructure like roads or bridges. So we ask: how can the public sector better support open source maintenance?”

The actual monetary value of GitHub and Microsoft’s total contributions to open-source software is not published. Given the two companies’ enthusiasm for proper funding for “digital infrastructure,” perhaps it’s surprising that the extent of their munificence isn’t trumpeted from the rooftops.

Perhaps a more likely interpretation is that companies like Microsoft acknowledge the lack of funding for the infrastructure on which they have built highly profitable businesses (Microsoft: $32 billion pre-tax profits in 2024), but given the unacceptable ramifications of cutting shareholder dividends, it’s OK to ask the EU’s taxpayers to subsidise companies’ profiteering.

To put the figures into perspective, if Microsoft alone were to gift 0.1% of annual pretax profits to the Sovereign Tech Fund, its available funds for redistribution would rise from €10 to €42 million every year. If Microsoft were joined by other big technology companies from East and West doing something similar, the world’s critical digital infrastructure would be getting the type of investment it merits.

(Image source: “Girl on Garda lake – Sirmione, Italy – Fine art photography” by Giuseppe Milo (www.pixael.com) is licensed under CC BY 2.0.)