86% of corporate open source investment is employee labor time, not direct funding, leaving maintainers outside those companies with almost no financial support

The 2024 Open Source Software Funding Survey (a collaboration between GitHub, the Linux Foundation, and Harvard University with 501 respondents) found that while organizations collectively contribute an estimated $7.7 billion annually to open source, 86% of this is employee labor time on company-selected projects, not transferable financial contributions to independent maintainers. The median organization invests $520,600 of annual value, but only 14% reaches maintainers as money. Why it matters: independent maintainers of foundational libraries receive almost none of the $7.7 billion because it stays inside corporations as salary, so maintainers outside Big Tech cannot sustain themselves on open source work, so the projects corporations do not directly use but indirectly depend upon (transitive dependencies) receive zero investment, so critical low-level libraries like core-js (used by 75% of the top 1,000 websites) have maintainers who publicly document financial hardship, so the funding model systematically directs resources to visible high-profile projects while starving the invisible foundational layer. The structural root cause is that corporations optimize open source investment for their own strategic needs (hiring, product integration, ecosystem control) rather than ecosystem health, and no mechanism exists to redistribute corporate open source labor budgets toward the transitive dependency maintainers who actually underpin the software supply chain.