In this year’s last SQUARE talk, Julie will examine the scale and broader impact of CERN’s contributions to open-source software.
SPEAKER: Julie Skoven Hinge, M.Sc. student at ITU.
TITLE: How to Value Open Source Contributions? An Institutional Perspective from CERN
ABSTRACT: This study provides a methodology for organizations to systematically assess the scale and impact of their contributions to open-source software (OSS). The proposed methodology combines archival data from Software Heritage with usage metrics, dependency analysis, economic valuation models, and interviews to build a comprehensive understanding of institutional OSS involvement. Applying this framework to CERN reveals over six million commits across more than 50,000 projects and highlights CERN’s most impactful initiatives. While the analysis focuses primarily on commit-based data, it provides a broad overview of CERN’s OSS engagement. Beyond CERN, the methodology offers a reusable framework for organizations seeking to measure and evaluate their open-source contributions.