For 15 years, open supply has functioned as one thing near scripture in ICT4D.
- Rules for Digital Growth enshrined it as Precept 6.
- Digital Public Items Alliance constructed a worldwide motion round it.
- UNICEF Innovation declared that it will solely construct open supply in 2026
- Donor procurement steerage treats “we’ll open supply it” as proof of sustainability.
Anybody who has tried to defend a proprietary device in a proposal evaluate is aware of the social value of confronting Open Supply software program true believers.
So I paid consideration when NetHope printed Harnessing AI for Humanitarian Influence – a synthesis of 11 humanitarian AI deployments at IRC, Mercy Corps, ICRC, GiveDirectly, and others. Buried within the cross-cutting evaluation is a sentence that quietly takes a hammer to one in every of our sector’s foundational beliefs.
Right here it’s, verbatim from the report:
- “Open-source doesn’t eradicate value, it redistributes it. Licensing charges are changed by coordination calls for: sustaining codebases, documenting instruments, onboarding contributors, and governing shared infrastructure. For resource-constrained NGOs, these coordination prices can equal or exceed the worth of a industrial license.”
Learn that once more. Severely. Its a daring assertion that deserves a second’s reflection.
NetHope, a corporation that has spent twenty years serving to NGOs undertake expertise, is telling us that the entire value of possession math we now have been utilizing to justify open supply mandates could also be flawed for the everyday operational humanitarian group.
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Earlier than You Quote This Report
I’m going to provide the contrarian argument that this discovering deserves. However first, the disclosure that the report itself doesn’t foreground.
The NetHope Middle for the Digital Nonprofit, which produced this evaluation, lists 4 companions on the within cowl: Field, Okta, PagerDuty, and Microsoft.
- Field sells proprietary cloud storage.
- Okta sells proprietary id administration.
- PagerDuty sells proprietary incident response.
- Microsoft doesn’t want an introduction.
Each funder of this report has industrial causes to need NGOs spending much less time on open supply and extra time on industrial licenses.
This doesn’t make the report’s findings flawed.
NetHope is a critical group, the case research are well-documented, and the open supply critique is one paragraph in a 13-page evaluation that additionally praises fAIr and POMELO for publishing their code on GitHub.
However when a analysis product funded by proprietary distributors has a discovering that proprietary software program could also be cheaper than open supply for NGOs, mental honesty requires naming the battle earlier than citing the conclusion.
Maintain each issues in thoughts. The funding supply is an actual purpose for skepticism. The argument should still be appropriate.
The Argument Is Most likely Right Anyway
When NetHope’s vendor-funded report says coordination prices can equal or exceed industrial licensing, we should always hear as a result of they’re echoing what 4 completely different organizations have already stated with their very own cash on the road.
1. OpenLMIS
The OpenLMIS neighborhood got here to virtually the identical conclusion six years in the past, and so they have been funded by USAID and the Gates Basis, not Microsoft. When OpenLMIS went searching for sustainability, they ended up with three choices:
- Cost implementations for ongoing upkeep,
- Broaden to personal clinics as paying clients,
- Hand core software program upkeep to a non-public accomplice.
They selected choice three and partnered with a industrial agency referred to as Vitalliance in 2021. The “free” open supply provide chain device was stored alive by a non-public firm that wanted it built-in into its industrial worth chain.
2. DEEP
DEEP, the humanitarian knowledge evaluation platform documented in NetHope’s report, didn’t get that fortunate. It shut down in 2024 not as a result of it failed however as a result of its funding cycle ended. Open supply didn’t reserve it. No one was paying the coordination tax.
3. Norwegian Crimson Cross
Mikael Hailu of the Norwegian Crimson Cross made the identical level in August 2025, warning that the majority International South open supply instruments are “mission-specific, tightly certain to domains like public well being, training, or social companies” with narrower consumer bases than the Apache or Linux comparisons we like to invoke.
Basis-backed open supply works for Kubernetes as a result of Google, IBM, and Crimson Hat assign full-time engineers to it. No one is assigning full-time engineers to your mHealth device in Malawi.
4. Growth Gateway
Growth Gateway argued bluntly final yr that “open supply is seen as an inherently sustainable choice. This can be a misunderstanding of each the worth of open supply and expertise lifecycles.”
They’d watched an internationally-applauded system go offline as a result of the federal government didn’t funds for server prices. Open supply didn’t forestall that. It might have made it extra probably, by permitting everybody within the funding chain to imagine another person was carrying the upkeep load.
What This Means for Software program Procurement
Three issues ought to change in how the sector talks about open supply in 2026, and none of them require abandoning the precept.
First, cease letting “we are going to open supply it” perform as a sustainability plan.
It isn’t one. An actual sustainability plan names who pays for coordination, upkeep, retraining, internet hosting, safety patching, and contributor governance for the subsequent 5 years, in {dollars}, with a named funder. In case your software program improvement proposal doesn’t have that, the open supply clause is ornament.
Second, funds the open supply coordination layer explicitly as a line merchandise.
NetHope’s framing of open supply as a “cost-reallocation technique” quite than a cost-reduction technique is the precise psychological mannequin. The price didn’t vanish. It moved from a vendor bill to your employees calendar, the place it’s tougher to see and simpler to underfund.
Third, cease treating industrial distributors as an ethical failure.
Typically a managed industrial software program companies with a service-level settlement, a safety workforce, and a contractual obligation to keep up the product is the cheaper, extra sustainable, extra accountable alternative for a specific humanitarian use case.
The open supply maximalist place, that NGOs funded with public cash ought to by no means use proprietary instruments, has produced actual casualties: instruments that died as a result of no person was paid to maintain them alive, and procurement selections made on ideology quite than match.
Open Supply Is Nice – In Particular Circumstances
Open supply stays important for digital public infrastructure, for instruments that have to outlive any single vendor, for code that shouldn’t be held hostage to at least one firm’s pricing selections.
fAIr and POMELO publishing on GitHub is genuinely good. The community-generated coaching knowledge fAIr makes use of to appropriate International North bias is precisely the sort of public good the sector needs to be constructing.
However for the operational software program instruments sitting in entrance of an NGO proper now, the query is now not “open or proprietary.” It’s “who’s funding the coordination layer, and for the way lengthy.” The trustworthy reply to that query will decide whether or not the device exists in 2030. The license connected to it is not going to.