The World Runs 20 Billion Instances of Curl. Where’s the Support?

AMSTERDAM — There’s plenty of money in the global economy. And a big part of the economy runs on software. And software is mostly open source.

We’ve heard that before.

However, many companies still fail to invest in open source projects, despite the benefits they offer. What is the value of open source? It’s worth $8.8 trillion, a total that reflects what it would cost to create software from scratch if it weren’t freely available, according to Harvard University.

Too often, the burden to support open source projects comes down to…