Putting a Value on Open Source Communities

Olivier Huez — May 7, 2025

Dear Friends, After Abel, it's my turn to share some thoughts with you. Unlike Abel, who shared a bird's eye view of the Open Source landscape and why we think it's the decade for Open Source, I will dive into one of the things that makes OSS unique: its community.

As investors focused on Open Source, one of the most common questions we get is: "How do you evaluate an Open Source company?" And our answer always comes back to the same place: the community. A thriving community is the heartbeat of any open source project. It is both the product's biggest asset and its most powerful moat.

But how do you actually put a value on a community? That's the question we set out to answer. In this article, I'll walk you through how we think about communities, how we break them down, and how we've built a proprietary scoring model to quantify their value.

What Makes a Community?

Before we talk about open source, let's zoom out. Communities exist everywhere. Think of Taylor Swift's Swifties, Real Madrid's Madridistas, or Harley-Davidson's riders. These are not just fan bases; they are ecosystems with layered levels of engagement.

Take Real Madrid as an example:

• At the core, you have the socios, the members who vote on club decisions and show up to every match.
• Then come the season-ticket holders who attend regularly.
• Beyond them, the jersey buyers, merchandise collectors, and TV viewers.
• And at the outermost layer, millions of casual followers on social media who may never set foot in the Bernabeu.

Each layer contributes differently. The socios shape the club's direction. The jersey buyers fund it. The social media followers amplify its reach. No single layer is "the community"; the value lies in the full stack, and in how the layers interact.

The same logic applies to open source.

How to Divide a Community (and Conquer Its Inner Working)?

When we analyze any community, whether it's a football club, a consumer brand, or an open source project, we look at five dimensions of contribution:

1. Product Development Contribution

Who is actively building the product? In football, that's the players and coaching staff. In open source, that's the core contributors writing code, reviewing pull requests, and maintaining the repository.

2. Product Improvement

Who helps make the product better without directly building it? Think of the fans who give tactical feedback, or in open source, the users who file bug reports, suggest features, and test beta releases.

3. Direct Revenue

Who pays? Season ticket holders, merchandise buyers, and broadcast subscribers for a football club. For an open source company, it's the enterprise customers paying for managed hosting, premium features, or support contracts.

4. Distribution / Marketing

Who spreads the word? The fans who wear the jersey to school, the bloggers writing tutorials, the developers tweeting about their favorite new tool. This layer is where open source truly shines: every user is a potential advocate.

5. Awareness / Influence

Who gives the project legitimacy? When a prominent engineer stars a repo, when a major enterprise adopts the tool, when a government recommends it, that's influence. It doesn't generate direct revenue, but it opens every door.

These five dimensions form the framework we use to evaluate any community. Now let's apply it to open source.

So What About Open Source Communities?

Open source communities are unique because the lines between users and builders are blurred. A user today can become a contributor tomorrow and an evangelist the day after. The community is not just a go-to-market channel; it is the product development engine itself.

As GitLab puts it: "Community is to Open Source what clinical trials are to pharmaceuticals. It's not a nice-to-have; it's the process by which the product is validated, improved, and ultimately trusted."

At commit, we've developed a Community Score model that attempts to quantify the value of an open source community. The model is built on a simple insight: community size alone doesn't determine value. What matters is the structure of the community, the growth dynamics, and the depth of engagement at each layer.

We break an open source community into five concentric levels, each representing a different depth of engagement and a different type of value creation:

Level 1: Code Contributors

These are the people who write code and submit pull requests. They are the core builders, the ones shaping the product directly. This is the smallest but most valuable group. A healthy project has a growing number of contributors beyond the founding team, it signals that the project has real traction and that the codebase is accessible enough for others to build on.

Level 2: Content Creators

These are the people who write documentation, blog posts, tutorials, videos, and conference talks about the project. They don't write code, but they make the project accessible and visible. Content creators are a leading indicator of community health: if people are investing their time to explain your project, it means they believe in it enough to stake their reputation on it.

Level 3: Issue Creators

These are the users who file bug reports, request features, and report problems. They are actively using the product and care enough to help improve it. Issue creation is a signal of real-world usage. A project with lots of issues is not a project with lots of problems; it's a project with lots of engaged users.

Level 4: Commentators

These are the people who comment on issues, participate in discussions, answer questions on forums, and engage in the project's communication channels (Discord, Slack, GitHub Discussions). They form the social fabric of the community. Commentators are the glue that holds the community together and makes it feel alive.

Level 5: Followers

These are the people who star the repo, follow the project on social media, or subscribe to the newsletter. They are the widest layer, the awareness base. Followers matter because they represent the top of the funnel. Today's follower is tomorrow's user, next month's issue creator, and next year's contributor.

Calculating the Score

Our Community Score is not a simple sum of these levels. We weight each level differently based on its strategic value:

• Level 1 (Code Contributors) carries the highest weight because direct product contribution is the hardest to generate and the most valuable.
• Level 2 (Content Creators) is weighted heavily because it signals deep engagement and drives organic distribution.
• Level 3 (Issue Creators) indicates real product usage and active feedback loops.
• Level 4 (Commentators) reflects community vitality and support capacity.
• Level 5 (Followers) provides the volume base but carries the lowest individual weight.

But the score isn't just about the snapshot. We also factor in dynamics:

• Growth rate at each level: Is the contributor base expanding? Are more people filing issues?
• Conversion between levels: Are followers becoming issue creators? Are issue creators becoming contributors? A healthy community has upward mobility.
• Retention: Are contributors sticking around or churning? A project that constantly loses its top contributors has a problem, no matter how many stars it has.
• Diversity: Is the project dependent on one or two contributors, or is there a broad base? Bus factor matters enormously.

The final score is a composite that captures both the current state and the trajectory of the community. A small but fast-growing, well-structured community can score higher than a large but stagnant one.

So, What Does It Look Like?

We apply this model to every open source company we evaluate. It gives us a quantitative lens on what is often treated as a purely qualitative judgment. When we see a project with a high Community Score, we see a company that has:

• A product that people care enough about to contribute to
• An organic distribution engine that reduces customer acquisition costs
• A feedback loop that accelerates product development
• A moat that competitors cannot easily replicate

When we see a low or declining score, we see red flags: over-reliance on the founding team, lack of real adoption, or a community that exists on paper (stars) but not in practice (contributions).

The Community Score doesn't replace traditional investment analysis. We still look at revenue, team, market size, and product-market fit. But it adds a dimension that is specific to open source and, we believe, predictive of long-term success.

Back to Football Fans

Let me come back to where we started. Real Madrid is one of the most valuable sports franchises in the world, not because it has the most fans (although it does have a lot), but because of the depth and structure of its community. The socios make it resilient. The season-ticket holders make it profitable. The global fan base makes it a brand.

Open source communities work the same way. The contributors make the product. The issue creators make it better. The content creators make it known. The followers make it a movement.

At commit, we believe that understanding and quantifying this community stack is the key to identifying the next great open source companies. That's why we built the Community Score, and that's why we put it at the center of our investment process.

THIS HOUSE BELIEVES THAT...

• Community size (stars, followers) is a vanity metric. Community structure and dynamics are what matter.
• The best open source companies are community-first, not code-first. The code is the artifact; the community is the asset.
• Conversion rates between community layers (follower to user to contributor) are the most underrated metric in open source.
• A high Community Score is a leading indicator of product-market fit, stronger than most traditional SaaS metrics at the early stage.
• Investors who don't understand open source communities will systematically undervalue the best OSS companies, and that's our edge.

We'd love to hear your thoughts. How do you evaluate communities? What metrics matter most to you? Hit reply and let's discuss.

Until next time,
Olivier