What is the true value of open source?

(A print of this hangs in my living room. Its presence here will be explained.)

Savio Rodrigues recently measured it through venture capital returns. But with open source squeezing costs out of software, especially marketing and distribution costs, those numbers are bound to underestimate reality.

Sourceforge wants you to vote on its Community Choice awards, and that's another way to measure value. But democracy is bound to favor mass market projects, and some of the most important things happening in open source today involve enterprise development tools like those of Eclipse.

Another way to measure open source is through outreach, the market depths open source can take us to in dealing with the problems of the world's 6 billion. The growth of new forums like the OSS Summit in Hong Kong and new tools like Canonical's Storm, a Python mapper, attest to this.

The point is that no one metric values open source correctly. It's not an apples-to-apples match with proprietary business models. Its impact isn't just measured by the mass market.

The sharing of code and free distribution aren't just a business story, or a political one, or a social one. The metrics we use to measure it must probe more deeply, and more widely, to get the full picture.

Current metrics are like the dots in a Seurat painting, such as the one above. We need a wider perspective to understand the whole.