[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-84824-en":3,"doc-seo-84824-105":29,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":90},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":4,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":20,"is_downloadable":20,"audit_status":20,"page_count":21,"language":22,"language_code":23,"site_id":24,"html_lang":23,"table_of_contents":25,"faqs":26,"seo_title":13,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":27,"read_time":28},84824,8796095462418,"Noah","https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/80000253c1241d02b47?x-image-process=image/resize,m_fixed,w_180,h_180&k=1778826106357471780",8,"Research & Report","Measuring the Invisible: Evaluating the Impact of Public Funding on Open Source Software","Open Source Software (OSS) underpins modern digital infrastructure while often receiving limited attention from the institutions and societies that rely on it. The 2021 log4j vulnerability highlighted this dependency and increased recognition of OSS funding for digital sovereignty and supply chain security. Using the Sovereign Tech Agency as a public-funding pioneer, the study addresses a key gap: the causal effect of such funding on project sustainability. Results show a significant positive impact on project velocity (commits, pull requests, and new issues) but no significant change in releases, contributors, or closed issues, implying mobilisation of existing work rather than expansion of the developer base.","arXiv :2607 .05413v1 [ cs .CY] 16 Jun 2026  \nMEASURING THE INVISIBLE: EVALUATING THE IMPACT OF PUBLIC FUNDING ON OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE  \nDomenech Burin, Laia  \nData Scientist  \nSovereign Tech Agency  \nBerlin, Germany  \n[laia@sovereign.tech](laia@sovereign.tech)  \nABSTRACT  \nOpen Source Software (OSS) forms a critical layer of contemporary digital infrastructure, yet remains largely overlooked by the institutions and societies that depend on it. The 2021 log4j vulnerability exposed this dependence, prompting both private and public organisations to recognise OSS funding as an instrument for enhancing digital sovereignty and software supply chain security. A pioneer model of public funding for OSS is the Sovereign Tech Agency (STA) . With an extensive portfolio of complementary programmes, the agency invests in targeted software maintenance work, the people behind the code and the identification of critical vulnerabilities in digital infrastructure. Despite growing institutional interest, the causal impact of public funding on OSS project sustainability remains empirically unresolved. Existing literature is divided between econometric and sociotechnical approaches with few attempts at causal identification.  \nThis work aims to bridge that divide by combining a Goal-Question-Metric framework with the Generalized Synthetic Control Method to estimate the causal effect of the Sovereign Tech Fund, the Agency’s primary program, on OSS repository activity. Counterfactual trajectories are constructed from a matched donor pool of unfunded projects, enabling identification of what funded repositories would have looked like in the absence of intervention. The main results show that the funding has a significant positive effect on project velocity metrics: commits, pull requests—both merged and new ones—, and new issues. There is no significant effect on the number of releases, contributors or closed issues. This indicates that the STF funding mobilises existing development activity rather than expanding the contributor base or accelerating backlog resolution. These findings carry practical implications for the design of public OSS funding evaluation frameworks, where assessment metrics should be matched to programme objectives rather than applied uniformly across interventions.  \n1 Introduction  \nOpen Source Software (OSS) is software whose source code is publicly available for inspection, use, redistribution and modification, which is often created in a decentralized manner and distributed for free. It is the cornerstone of the multiple components that shape the digital infrastructure with which we interact every day. Digital infrastructure can bethought of in the same way as physical infrastructure: access to water, roads to move on or electrical systems are used every day and and whose provision is guaranteed by States. Digital infrastructure works the same way-although we do not often see or think about the apps and software we use on a daily basis, they all rely upon free and public code to function ([1]) . Over 96% of codebases contain OSS ([2]), and roughly 70-90% of any software stack consists of OSS ([3]) . Rather than being a form of community-based altruism, OSS is a critical cornerstone of our modern worlds’economic, political and social systems.  \nThe significance of OSS embedded in digital infrastructure gained relevance in 2021, during the log4j vulnerability exposure which could have affected a wide range of applications: ranging from Twitter, to Hadoop, Spark to Steam and Minecraft, just to name a few ([4]) . Incidents like this, along with the XZ utils backdoor discovered in 2024 ([5]) illustrate the consequences of societal oversight and under-maintenance of OSS projects. When a system relies on the unpaid labor of volunteer communities without offering reciprocal contributions, it becomes vulnerable to  \nMeasuring the Invisible: Evaluating the Impact of Public Funding on Open Source Software  \ncollapse if these communiti","cbCaieBifFdDhRa8","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaieBifFdDhRa8","pdf",1630924,1,22,"English","en",105,"# Introduction\n## Public funding models for OSS\n## Motivation from major security incidents\n## Challenges in evaluating causal effects","[{\"question\":\"What problem does the study focus on regarding OSS funding?\",\"answer\":\"It addresses the lack of empirical causal identification of how public funding affects OSS project sustainability.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the paper estimate the impact of public funding?\",\"answer\":\"It combines a Goal-Question-Metric framework with the Generalized Synthetic Control Method to build counterfactual trajectories from matched unfunded projects.\"},{\"question\":\"What outcomes does the paper find the Sovereign Tech Fund changes significantly?\",\"answer\":\"Funding significantly increases project velocity metrics—commits, merged and new pull requests, and new issues—while showing no significant effects on releases, contributor count, or closed 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problem does the study focus on regarding OSS funding?","Question",{"text":74,"@type":75},"It addresses the lack of empirical causal identification of how public funding affects OSS project sustainability.","Answer",{"name":77,"@type":72,"acceptedAnswer":78},"How does the paper estimate the impact of public funding?",{"text":79,"@type":75},"It combines a Goal-Question-Metric framework with the Generalized Synthetic Control Method to build counterfactual trajectories from matched unfunded projects.",{"name":81,"@type":72,"acceptedAnswer":82},"What outcomes does the paper find the Sovereign Tech Fund changes significantly?",{"text":83,"@type":75},"Funding significantly increases project velocity metrics—commits, merged and new pull requests, and new issues—while showing no significant effects on releases, contributor count, or closed 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