FOSSY 2024 Wrap Up: Sophia Vargas on “A review of valuation models and their application to open source models”

In the seventh talk of the Science of Community track we organized for FOSSY, Google FOSS researcher Sophia Vargas offered an overview of different strategies for measuring the value of open source (particularly in the context of a company thinking about how to engage with FOSS).

Some of Sophia’s key insights are: models for measuring one-time cost are relatively widespread (but depend on outcome metrics like lines of code rather than difficulty); understanding the cost of maintenance and community is still in formative stages; and that business leaders can make use of research-grounded models developed to measure value and risk in an academic context into decisionmaking tools within a business context.

This is part 7 of an 8-part series sharing highlights from the Science of Community track at FOSSY. Visit the FOSSY site for more bio details and an abstract of the talk.