Open source is nearly universal among the 332 developers surveyed in 2024, but active contribution is not. The Linux Foundation Research report found that 96% of respondents consumed open-source software, while 49% both consumed and contributed and 47% consumed without actively contributing. Respondents primarily valued open source and professional events for learning, keeping current, finding projects, and building professional connections—not as proof that conferences cause promotions or that open source is automatically secure or sustainable.
The publication is formally titled Open Source Software Developer Report: How Developers Benefit from Professional Events. Linux Foundation Research conducted its 24-question survey in June and July 2024, with Intel as sponsor or partner. Read the original report.
What is the Open Source Developer Survey 2024?
“Open Source Developer Survey 2024” is the commonly used description of a Linux Foundation Research publication whose formal title is Open Source Software Developer Report: How Developers Benefit from Professional Events. Stephen Hendrick and Bianca Trinkenreich are identified as authors; the report also includes an Intel foreword by Arun Gupta.
It examines four connected questions: how developers use and contribute to open source, what they want from their careers, what they gain from professional events, and how they view open-source benefits and sustainability. It is a survey of developers’ experiences and opinions, not an audit of code repositories, project security, conference return on investment, or the global developer population.
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The Linux Foundation’s report landing page is available here when active.
Methodology: who answered and when?
Fieldwork and questionnaire
Data collection took place from June through July 2024. The questionnaire contained 24 questions covering screening, demographics, open-source involvement, career priorities, and professional events. The data therefore describes attitudes during that period; it is not a 2026 workforce survey.
Sample and recruitment
The principal sample was N = 332. Respondents were recruited through Linux Foundation subscribers and members, partner communities, social media, industry companies, IT vendors and service providers, and nonprofit, academic, and government organizations. The report says the sample covered the Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the rest of the world, and describes screening and data-quality procedures.
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What the sample cannot represent
This was not a random, probability-based census of developers. Recruitment through Linux Foundation and partner channels can overrepresent people who already use open source heavily, follow open-source events, or work in connected professional networks. Percentages should therefore be read as findings among these respondents, not estimates for every developer.
- Some charts exclude “don’t know,” “not sure,” or missing responses, so their effective denominator can differ from 332.
- The answers are self-reported perceptions and recollections rather than independently measured behavior.
- The survey does not establish causation, such as whether attending an event produced a promotion or better software.
- Intel’s sponsorship or partnership is part of the report’s institutional context. It does not by itself invalidate the findings, but readers should consider the focus on professional events when interpreting them.
How respondents use and contribute to open source
| Reported relationship with OSS | Share of respondents | How to read it |
|---|---|---|
| Consume open-source software | 96% | Reported use of OSS by survey respondents |
| Consume and contribute | 49% | Participation can include code and non-code activity |
| Consume without actively contributing | 47% | “Not contributing” does not mean no interest or community contact |
| No involvement or another status | Approximately 4% | Residual category reported by the survey |
The central pattern is a wide gap between consumption and contribution. Open source is embedded in most respondents’ work, while roughly half reported both using and contributing to it.
Contribution is broader than submitting production code. The report’s participation categories include occasional contributors, maintainers, core contributors, committers, documentation contributors, and people involved in community work. Issue triage, reviews, governance, support, documentation, security work, and moderation can all sustain a project even when a person does not merge code.
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What developers want from their careers
Learning and competence were more prominent than job mobility. The survey asked respondents to rate career priorities as very or extremely important:
| Career priority | Share |
|---|---|
| Learning new skills | 87% |
| Improving existing skills | 87% |
| Demonstrating excellence in the current role | 81% |
| Staying current with rapidly changing technology | 77% |
| Understanding technology’s effect on the respondent’s industry | 77% |
| Connecting with other professionals | 60% |
| Changing roles or employers | 28% |
These are stated priorities, not evidence that open-source participation caused advancement. They suggest that developers may treat projects, documentation, maintainers, and events as a continuing learning network, while changing employers is a less common immediate objective.
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What value do professional events provide?
Respondents rated event benefits on a scale; the figures below combine the report’s “high value” and “extremely high value” responses.
| Reported event benefit | High or extremely high value |
|---|---|
| Finding inspiration and motivation | 63% |
| Learning new skills and best practices | 60% |
| Keeping up with the open-source ecosystem | 59% |
| Discovering projects useful to the organization | 57% |
| Having fun | 53% |
| Networking opportunities | 52% |
| Career advancement | 44% |
| Finding solutions to technical challenges | 44% |
These numbers describe perceived value. They do not show that every attendee received the benefit, that an event caused a career outcome, or that one conference is objectively better than another.
Open-source-focused, industry, and vendor events
The report distinguishes open-source-focused events from industry-focused and vendor-focused events. Examples of open-source-focused gatherings include Linux Foundation Open Source Summit, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, and FOSDEM. Examples of vendor-focused events include Google I/O, Microsoft Build, GitHub Universe, and AWS re:Invent. These examples are categories in the report, not a claim that all are operated by the Linux Foundation.
The categories matter because incentives differ. A project-community event is usually organized around contributors, maintainers, governance, and a shared technical ecosystem. An industry event may emphasize a sector’s operational problems. A vendor event can provide detailed product training and ecosystem access while also serving commercial goals. Attendees should choose according to the knowledge, contacts, and contribution opportunities they actually need.
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The sustainability tension
The report asks about organizational value and the sustainability of open source. Secondary coverage attributes several figures to the report, including 88% agreeing that OSS lets organizations innovate faster, 69% saying its benefits outweigh its costs, 49% agreeing that OSS has sustainability problems, 82% saying those problems could be addressed if organizations gave back more effectively, and 81% associating open-source development with better code quality and security. Because these figures are available here through a secondary summary rather than the full chart context, consult the primary PDF before using them as standalone statistics: secondary coverage and primary report.
The underlying tension is clearer than any single percentage: organizations depend heavily on OSS, yet respondents still perceive sustainability problems. “Giving back” can mean funding critical projects, paying maintainers, assigning engineering time upstream, improving documentation, supporting security work, participating in governance, sharing fixes, and maintaining community infrastructure. The survey does not rank those interventions or prove that one is sufficient.
What the findings mean for developers
- Use events strategically. Define whether the goal is a new skill, project discovery, maintainer access, or networking before paying registration and travel costs.
- Choose a contribution path. Documentation, issue triage, testing, reviews, translation, governance, and community support are legitimate starting points alongside code.
- Follow through. Convert event contacts and ideas into a patch, documented issue, project contribution, or internal knowledge-sharing session.
- Account for access. Cost, travel, visas, time zones, disability access, caregiving, and employer support affect who can obtain event benefits. A local meetup or online project community may offer better value.
What employers should do
- Fund attendance selectively and allow paid time to apply what employees learn.
- Recognize documentation, reviews, issue triage, security fixes, and community leadership in performance systems.
- Maintain an open-source contribution policy that covers licensing, employer time, security disclosure, and upstreaming.
- Track outcomes such as knowledge transfer, upstream improvements, and reduced duplicated work—not only contacts collected or sessions attended.
- Support critical dependencies with money, engineering time, security assistance, or governance participation.
Paying for a conference while denying time for upstream work is a common failure mode: the organization buys exposure without enabling contribution.
What maintainers and event organizers should do
Maintainers and foundations
- Provide newcomer-friendly documentation and explicit non-code contribution routes.
- Offer mentorship, transparent governance, and clear review expectations.
- Invest in maintainer compensation, moderation, security, and community infrastructure.
- Create follow-up channels so conference interest can become sustained participation rather than one-time enthusiasm.
Conference organizers
- Combine technical sessions with hands-on learning, project discovery, maintainer access, mentorship, and practical problem-solving.
- Publish accessible post-event resources and offer formats that reduce travel and cost barriers.
- Demonstrate attendee outcomes instead of using survey percentages alone to justify higher prices.
What this survey cannot tell you
- It cannot estimate the percentage of all developers worldwide who use or contribute to OSS.
- It cannot prove that conference attendance causes promotion, employment changes, productivity, or better code.
- It does not measure repository activity, vulnerability rates, code quality, project health, maintainer burnout, or economic value.
- It does not identify the best open-source business model, platform, license, or cloud provider.
- It cannot show how attitudes changed after July 2024.
Bottom line
The 2024 Linux Foundation survey depicts an ecosystem that is widely consumed, substantially—but not universally—contributed to, and valued as a professional learning network. Its most important unresolved issue is whether organizational dependence on open source is matched by adequate support for the maintainers, contributors, and infrastructure that sustain it.
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