The 60-second procurement test

The useful part

A buyer should be able to answer three questions in about a minute: does this vendor contribute at all, how much do they contribute compared to other vendors, and do they work on the parts of the project I care about? It is one procurement factor alongside delivery capability, expertise, and price. Vendor claims are hard to verify and compare Say you need a vendor for your Drupal site, your Kubernetes cluster, or whatever Open Source software you use, and two firms bid.

How it works

• A project has to connect individual contributors to the organizations that employed or funded their work, and those relationships can change over time.
• More importantly, Open Source contribution can include documentation, support, event organization, governance work, promotion, and more.
• Much of that work happens outside the code repository or isn't recorded in a form a buyer can easily interpret.
• Projects should decide which contributions matter Drupal has tracked contribution credits since 2015, following a method I proposed in 2014 and now <a href="https://www.drupal.org/contributi...
• I believe any Open Source project with a commercial or institutional funding ecosystem should publish an official contribution record: who contributes, how much and over what period, what kind of work they...

What to take from it

Both say they're deeply involved in the project, and both might be telling the truth by their own definition of "involved". Without a project record, verifying those claims often means reconstructing each vendor's contribution history yourself. The code repository seems like the obvious place to start, but even counting commits by vendor is not simple.

Details worth keeping

Of course, contribution does not prove that a vendor can deliver.