Governments are increasingly employing funding for open source software (OSS) development as a policy lever to support the security of software supply chains, digital sovereignty, economic growth, and national competitiveness in science and innovation, among others. However, the impacts of public funding on OSS development remain poorly understood, with a lack of consensus on how to meaningfully measure them. This gap hampers assessments of the return on public investment and impedes the optimisation of public-interest funding strategies. We address this gap with a toolkit of methodological considerations that may inform such measurements, drawing on prior work on OSS valuations and community health metrics by the Community Health Analytics Open Source Software (CHAOSS) project as well as our first-hand learnings as practitioners tasked with evaluating funding programmes by the Next Generation Internet initiative and the Sovereign Tech Agency. We discuss salient considerations, including the importance of accounting for funding objectives, project life stage and social structure, and regional and organisational cost factors. Next, we present a taxonomy of potential social, economic, and technological impacts that can be both positive and negative, direct and indirect, internal (i.e. within a project) and external (i.e. among a project's ecosystem of dependents and users), and manifest over various time horizons. Furthermore, we discuss the merits and limitations of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches, as well as options for and hazards of estimating multiplier effects. With this toolkit, we contribute to the multi-stakeholder conversation about the value and impacts of funding on OSS developers and society at large.

翻译：政府日益将资助开源软件开发作为政策杠杆，以支持软件供应链安全、数字主权、经济增长以及科学与创新领域的国家竞争力等目标。然而，公共资金对开源软件开发的影响仍缺乏深入理解，且对于如何有效衡量这些影响尚未形成共识。这一空白阻碍了对公共投资回报的评估，也影响了公共利益资助策略的优化。为填补这一空白，我们提出了一套方法论考量工具包，旨在为相关测量提供参考。该工具包借鉴了社区健康分析开源软件项目关于开源软件价值评估与社区健康指标的先前研究，以及我们作为实践者在评估"下一代互联网"倡议和主权技术机构资助项目过程中获得的第一手经验。我们讨论了若干关键考量因素，包括考虑资助目标、项目生命周期阶段与社会结构、以及区域与组织成本因素的重要性。接着，我们提出了一套潜在的社会、经济与技术影响分类体系，这些影响可能具有正负双重性、直接与间接性、内部性（即项目内部）与外部性（即项目依赖者与用户构成的生态系统），并可能在不同时间跨度上显现。此外，我们探讨了定性、定量及混合方法的优势与局限，以及估算乘数效应的可行方案与潜在风险。通过这一工具包，我们旨在促进关于资金对开源开发者及社会整体价值与影响的多方对话。