Measuring success in open source to the organization

Success in open source is really hard to define. It’s not as straightforward as when building a product – in building a product, the success comes from the number of users or customers and the revenue from that, while in open source, usage is one part but so are the other potential impacts on the organization. Since open source projects tend not to be tied directly to revenue (after all, you are giving away code for free!), it becomes hard to succinctly define the Return on Investment (ROI).

But, there are some other ways to measure success. Let’s look at a few.

Setting (reasonable) goals

We touched on this earlier, but the open source project being launched or the work of the team contributing to an open source project should have certain goals. We talked about open source being a long-term versus short-term play, so goal planning has to have that in mind. But knowing how to show incremental progress...