Financial expenditures
How the ROI model counts direct spending — memberships, event attendance, event sponsorships, and training — and why some types are treated as fixed units.
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Direct spending is recorded in dollars and used as observed. Each source is aggregated by organization account, project, and calendar year, then mapped to the organization through the account mapping.
Memberships
Each paid membership's amount is spread across the calendar years of its real term, in proportion to the number of days of the term that fall in each year:
amount(y) = price × (days of the term falling in year y) / (days in the term)
- The term runs from the membership's install date to the earlier of its end date and the install date plus its recorded membership length. Memberships whose end date is recorded as open-ended still get their real term from the membership length. A non-positive term falls back to 12 months from the install date.
- Every year of the term is covered, not just two, so a membership's yearly amounts always add up to its paid price.
- The membership's start date is not used. On renewals it is often overwritten with a later line-item date, which would stack several years of fees into one year.
- Only memberships with a positive paid price are counted.
Money is credited once, to the project that sold it. A foundation's own membership belongs to the foundation, and its sub-projects are separate. See Counting each resource once.
- Project membership: every membership except the Linux Foundation one, attributed to the project it belongs to. Quantity is 1 and price is the apportioned amount.
- Linux Foundation membership: the organization's foundation-wide fee is divided equally among its key projects and assigned to each, so it sums to the fee and is not copied. Organizations with no key projects get no Linux Foundation membership cost. Quantity is 1 and price is the share per project.
Event attendance
Only paid registrations tied to a project are counted.
- Net revenue is converted to USD with a fixed exchange-rate table. Registrations in currencies not in the table are excluded.
- Quantity is the number of distinct registrations in the year.
- Price is the average USD net revenue per registration plus an event overhead of $3,000 per attendee, a stand-in for travel and time away.
Event sponsorship
Sponsorships with a positive price in USD are counted. Sponsorships in a year are summed, quantity is 1, and price is the total sponsorship amount.
Education and training
Quantity is units sold in the year. Price is the median net revenue per unit across purchases, so a few unusually priced purchases do not dominate.
Fixed-unit types
Sponsorships and memberships are annual commitments rather than quantities that scale. The model records them as a single unit with the dollar amount as price. In estimation, these types use expenditure-share information instead of quantity ratios. See Stage 2: CES allocation.