Open source software contributes between £10.5 billion and £43.15 billion to the UK economy, according to a new report from OpenUK.

OpenUK, founded in 2018, is a not-for-profit company which supports open source collaboration and open technologies.

The report estimated, based on comparable figures from the European Union, that 126,000 people in the UK are involved in creating, developing and maintaining open source software.

OpenUK’s data is based on the model employed by the European Commission in their report on Open Source and Economic Impact, commissioned from Open Forum Europe and presented at The EU Open Source Policy Summit 2021.

Open UK’s estimate was based on the calculations from the European Commission report, which said the 260,000 EU-based open source contributors could lead to economic impact of between £60.9 billion and £84.15 billion in Europe.

“The world of open technology represents a massive opportunity to collaborate with others, develop new approaches to solving problems and improve digital services that we all now rely on every day,” said Amanda Brock, chief executive at OpenUK. “This report provides an overview of the economic impact that open source has for the UK using existing methodologies and figures.”

“The UK was the biggest contributor to open source in the EU, ahead of Germany and France so it’s not terribly surprising to see our scale post-Brexit.”

Cheryl Hung, VP Ecosystem, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, said: “The UK is one of the leading countries in the world when it comes to open source, it definitely punches above its weight in terms of usage and contributions back to open source.”

“Open source in general allows companies to focus on the things that they do best, on the things that are unique value propositions to them.”

She added: “For the services or products that don’t provide competitive advantages, there are open source tools and platforms to meet those needs.”

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