Modelos open source y responsabilidad social[Open source models and social responsibility]

Because open source assets are developed collectively, there is no single source for cost estimates of how much it has taken to develop the technology. There is a great value on open source delopments (OSD), but current legal framework for financial reporting doesn’t allow to report on them like on other assets. Thus, financial statements could be insufficient to assess properly the performance and the value generation potential. It is clear that ICT (information and communications technology) industry need a methodology to measure OSD and put such measure into organizational reports. OSD could be seen as a matter of social responsibility. Commitment to OSD means sharing technology and resources with communities worldwide to help eliminate the digital divide, create economic opportunity, and foster equal access to technology. Opening up a technology allows others to contribute innovations that individual companies might never have devised on their own, or at least much more quickly. The objective of our research is to identify indicators in order to measure OSD performance in ICT sector. Motivation that led us to carry out this analysis was the fact that, despite the many benefits attributed to OSD, no information about them was disclosed on annual reports. To reach our goal, we are conducting a webmetric study. We examine several successful OSD websites looking for success indicators. Our final objective is to recommend a methodology to calculate specific indicators about OSD to be disclosed on social responsibility reports.