State of OSPOs and Open Source Management (www.linuxfoundation.org)

The Linux Foundation’s LF Research and LF Education 2025 State of Tech Talent Report, based on a survey of hiring and training managers across the LF community, finds rising preparedness for cloud‑native stacks and generative AI, stronger engagement with security initiatives, and growing attention to long‑term sustainability practices. A standout finding: organizations with formal Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) report significantly higher rates of upstream contributions and measurable improvements in software quality, developer experience, and ecosystem influence. The report’s open dataset is available (DOI: 10.70828/DTJC2702) and was produced by a multi‑disciplinary research team including Adrienn Lawson and Bianca Trinkenreich. For the AI/ML community, the implications are concrete: OSPOs accelerate contributions to core infrastructure—containers, orchestration, model tooling and data pipelines—improving reproducibility, security posture, and interoperability needed for production ML systems. However, adoption hurdles remain: many organizations lack clear OSPO strategy, executive buy‑in, and convincing ROI metrics, limiting scale. The report underscores that targeted, sustainable investments in OSPOs and open‑source governance are strategic levers for accelerating safe, auditable, and collaborative AI development across enterprises and ecosystems.